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ANDREW VANASSE
WHAT DO YOU LIVE FOR? WHAT MAKES YOU FEEL ALIVE?
THE SMALL STUFF
Besides my family, I live for details—the beautiful little moments and particulars that elevate workaday life above the mundane. Often these moments manifest themselves in aesthetics: the way the trees on my drive home from work arch over the road and, for just a little way, form a lime-green tunnel. Or the way the materials I see from my living room sofa—raw leather on a butterfly chair, a sheepskin, a shiny brass light, a teak table—give me a cozy, pleased feeling, an ineffable sense of home. In the midst of putting together GRAY’s “Work Live Play” issue, I happened to tour artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s former home and studio in the high-desert village of Abiquiu, New Mexico. Exploring the ways people shape their homes, workspaces, and retreats was at the top of my mind, and O’Keeffe’s time-stopped adobe compound—perfectly preserved just as it was when she died in 1986, at age 98—offers myriad lessons on the art of living (and working and playing) well. Walking through O’Keeffe’s austere yet warm home—“I haven’t anything you can get along without” is how she described her almost monastic bedroom to Architectural Digest in 1981—I was hit with an acute case of house envy. It isn’t the home’s alluring minimalism (though there is that), and it isn’t the impressive array of classic midcentury furniture (which, however, I covet). It is the way the house subtly expresses, at every turn, this singular woman’s tastes and values. Along the garden walls, she arranged little treasures gleaned on her walks: bleached bones, interesting pebbles. Her dining table is a sheet of plywood set atop sawhorses; in the burnished surface’s scars and nicks, I could intuit years of meals and food prep. Along her front walk are the same scrubby desert plants you see everywhere around Santa Fe, but O’Keeffe had her gardener prune them into tiny, perfect bonsais. And in her living room, she’d had masons coat the adobe floor with a thin paste of flour and water. The floor needs recoating every few years and requires a strict socks-only policy but feels lovely underfoot. It isn’t practical, but it is certainly pleasing. There are risks to letting aesthetics rule your life, of course—and it’s easier to do if you are a famous artist living alone with your chow dog. (I write this days before having my second child, fully aware of the priority shift and narrowed focus that are about to rock my world.) Yet despite our daily responsibilities and routines, it’s worth taking time to appreciate the glimmering, fleeting glimpses of beauty that pervade quotidian life, which, if we’re lucky, is long and even a bit dull. Yet when we can discern the pleasures hidden within it, even small stuff reveals itself as sublime.
Jaime Gillin, Director of Editorial + Content Strategy jaime@graymag.com
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