I've bragged about my stepfather the artist several times before. What I don't say often enough is how his lifetime of art has inspired me. When I was somewhere in my teens, he went through a phase where he painted a lot of Western art. It was an evolution from what we called his "bucket phase," and it included several of my favorite works that he has ever done. My very favorite from this period is the first one I ever sweet-talked him out of, the painting that has hung in every bedroom I've lived in since I was twenty years old. At the time it was painted, he called it "Towards Vishnu Temple," but in later years, he has referred to it in more generic terms based on the photograph that inspired it, renaming it "Grand Canyon." I watched him painting this one, knowing in my heart it was going to be mine, even though it took a few years to convince him of that. I remember the day he constructed the frame for it as if it was yesterday. To match the Western themes he was using in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he used old barn wood in frames and as a design feature in the art gallery he owned back then. At some point, he ran out of his supply of real barnwood, and back then we weren't quite ready to tear down the old horse barn on our family's ranch property (it since fell over, and I'm still heartsick that I never got any pieces of it to use to build furniture). My stepfather made his own worn, weathered wood frames long before there was an entire cable network devoted to showing us how to do these things. He chipped and carved divots and cracks in layers of fresh dimensional lumber, and then carefully blended different gray paints to achieve exactly the look he wanted. To me, that frame is as much part of the art as the painting of the tree it surrounds. And it set in my heart a not-so-well-concealed passion for old weathered wood and all things rustic that continues to this day.
A month or so ago, I told you about a large set of bookshelves I was working on in the middle of the living room. I had people over to the house before it was finished, and I dragged it, the extra trim pieces, and the drop cloth it all rested on into my bedroom, and for weeks I've been stepping around it, throwing my dirty clothes on it, and pretending that someday I'd finish it. Over the last week, I applied the trim pieces, and last night I finally got a razor scraper to remove the overflow of Gorilla Glue on a few key surfaces. This morning I gave it a rough sand, just enough to knock off any splinters and dull the sharp edges so it didn't look brand new, and I gave it a couple coats of classic gray stain. The first coat was pretty thin, and it just looked like weathered pine, but I went around it again and took it a much darker gray, more like the deep tones of that old horse barn I miss so much. I let it dry in the middle of the kitchen, and when we got home tonight (to a house full of seriously intoxicating petroleum distillate fumes), I gave it one light coat of furniture wax. It came out exactly how I wanted it, rustic, soft, and not shiny. I love it so much, and I dedicate it to the art frame that inspired my love of barn wood. I've already unloaded four big boxes of paperback novels into it (stacked two deep on each shelf, with just a little room left over for books to come out that I don't get on Kindle), and I've temporarily housed a couple Boston ferns on it so that I can fit chairs around the table at Christmas. Finally, I am one step closer to being moved in, and I have what almost qualifies as a reading nook. Yet another reason to think that this house is my forever home.
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