Growing up in Addis Ababa, Jomo Tariku liked to sketch the furniture and artifacts that his father, a military attaché for the Ethiopian government, collected from Africa and around the world. He drew the hand-carved Asian tables and Persian rugs in the living room, the Scandinavian dining room set and the African masks, carved ivory tusks and copper trays from Zambia, the Congo, Zaire and Kenya. “Our house was like a bazaar, very eclectic,” recalls Tariku, who never imagined that his exact representations of items at home would lead to a career as a furniture designer.

Among the mix, one piece made a lasting impression: the three-legged African stool. The legacy of this useful object, he says, “seeped into my psyche. Those craftspeople had more influence on my work than anyone else.” Today, three-legged African stools are sought-after accent pieces, pictured on the pages of luxury-home magazines around the world. Some of the designs may well be his.

Born in Kenya, raised in Ethiopia and now based in Springfield, Virginia, Tariku designs furniture rooted in his African heritage. At the same time, the bold outlines of his polished pieces distill familiar forms, cutting across cultures with contemporary authority. “I’m trying to interpret what an African-based furniture design would be, always with the goal of clean lines,” he says.

Like the everyday stools of his youth, Tariku’s pieces are made of wood—solid ash and walnut from the U.S., as well as mahogany and high-quality Baltic birch plywood. Ebonized or natural finishes often interplay light against dark. In his lathe-turned Mukecha stools, rows of black rings may alternate with white or other bright colors. “I like the contrast,” he notes.

Tariku’s signature Nyala chair was inspired by the Nyala antelope native to the Ethiopian mountains. While that graceful creature has four legs, the designer’s chair has just three, each elegantly tapered and outwardly curved. Its hand-carved backrest, resembling smooth animal horns, bends gently inward at the perfect height to double as an armrest. Minus the backrest, the chair becomes a refined, three-legged stool.

“I kept looking at images of this beautiful animal,” says Tariku, describing his approach to this and other designs. “It started as a sketch; I kept drawing for more than a month or two.” Looking back, he recounts, “The sketching part was easy. Finding a builder took much longer.”

Tariku has a small wood shop in the garage of his family townhouse “to work out my ideas,” he says, but does not build his pieces full-scale. For more than two years, he had been looking for someone to construct the Nyala chair, which he hoped to introduce at the 2018 Salone del Mobile Satellite show in Milan. Happily, a few months before the opening, he met master wood craftsman David Bohnhoff at Richmond’s Craft + Design show. Looking through Tariku’s sketchbook, Bohnhoff stopped at the Nyala chair and said, “I’d like to take on that challenge.” Tariku agreed enthusiastically, and the two have collaborated on fabricating the designer’s chairs ever since; woodworkers in Rockville, Baltimore and Texas currently build his less complicated stools.

Before construction begins, Tariku uses 3-D modeling to help visualize his concepts, construction methods, ergonomics and the overall design balance of each piece. “Until you make the real thing, it’s hard to know,” he says. In fact, four prototypes of the Nyala chair were required before he and Bohnhoff were happy with it.

Tariku studied industrial design at the University of Kansas. Until entering, he had never heard of the field, intending to major in fine art. His furniture designs bridge both. “I don’t want my pieces to be only beautiful. They have to be comfortable too. They shouldn’t say ‘don’t sit on me—I’m art,’” observes the designer, who also works as a data scientist at the World Bank.

Tariku feels the time is right to extend the reach of his modern pieces. That sense is buoyed by his participation in the Black Artists + Designers Guild, a collective formed in 2018 to increase black representation in the design world. The Guild has promoted its members’ work with exhibitions in New York, Houston and High Point, North Carolina.

The art and design of those with African origins, he says, “brings richness” to the design universe. Until now, his chairs and stools have been based on sub-Saharan African influences. He hopes to broaden those references to parts of northern Africa, and to produce a full line of contemporary African-style furniture—the subject of his college thesis.

Tariku looks forward to a time when he can present his work at shows in Ghana and Nigeria, where he has exhibited before. “Do I want to? Oh, yes,” he beams. “All that’s coming.”

For more information, visit jomofurniture.com.

A long a shaded garden path beside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, six rustic structures beckon visitors—some get off their scooters to take photos. Those stepping inside discover even greater reason to pause within these exhilarating wood enclosures.

As if in a rugged cathedral, golden-hued boards rise in staggered formation toward multiple, 14-foot-tall peaks. Walls step in and bulge out, suggesting the movement of some organic creature. Slits, peepholes and larger openings pierce the tight joints, allowing light to penetrate. The narrow boundaries encourage close-up viewing of variations in tone, texture, grain and knot patterns. These wood qualities become exaggerated on the exterior as the rough bark of raw-milled lumber projects to create a jagged, primeval profile.

“I love wood because each piece is different—its color, grain and smell. Like every person, each piece is one-of-a-kind,” says artist Foon Sham, who designed and constructed this buoyant work. Called “Arches of Life” and made entirely of pine from Boyds, Maryland, the piece is among several large-scale installations by Sham now on the Smithsonian campus as part of its outdoor “Habitat” exhibit—open for viewing at a safe social distance through December.

Exactly what kind of habitat is this? An accompanying panel describes how fallen trees take on new life as protective shelters for animals. But in its own short life, this multi-part piece has also expressed other ideas. Built in 2016 and titled “Escape,” the sculpture was then a single, 62-foot-long work representing the artist’s response to its setting on the grounds of the Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, Virginia, the site of a former federal prison.

“There were escape tunnels under the prison,” Sham explains by phone from his studio, also in Lorton. As prisoners might have tallied the days until their release on cell-block walls, Sham wrote in pencil each section’s completed construction date on interior boards. The sculpture also represents a larger story of immigration, of escaping one country for another. Its craggy roofline follows map contours of the U.S./Mexico border and suggests mountain ranges of the American West.

The work reflects elements of its creator’s own history. As a student, Sham arrived in this country from Hong Kong in 1975. “The tunnel is a metaphor for the long journey to my American dream,” the artist observes. “It’s been a journey of hard work, continuing for 35 years.” Repeated openings in the sculpture’s walls indicate other possibilities. “There’s always a chance to get out; most artists do that many times in their lives,” he says. “This is an attempt to keep straight on, to reach the end of the tunnel—the target.”

Born in Macao, China, and raised in Hong Kong, Sham had little opportunity to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. Although he started drawing at age 10, the culture and education system directed students along more dependable career paths—medicine, law or computer science. Sham took painting classes at night and on weekends when, he recalls, “Learning to paint meant copying the Chinese masters. I spent four years copying. I never made a painting on my own.”

Entering the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, Sham took an introductory sculpture class and was baffled by the first assignment. “We were asked to do a self-portrait in any size and any material,” he remembers. “I was lost. My training was copying.” Living at the time with friends whose son was a carpenter, Sham picked up a band saw and some scraps of redwood, looked in the mirror and began assembling pieces into a composite head. It was the first time he had ever cut wood. “There was little opportunity to work with wood in Hong Kong. It’s a forest of buildings,” he says, chuckling.

Despite Sham’s misgivings, his portrait met with hearty approval from the teacher and class. “It changed my life,” he reveals. “That was my first opportunity to think about what I wanted to do as an artist—to follow my own DNA.”

It was the first step in his future career as a sculptor—and a professor of art. Since 1993, Sham has taught sculpture at University of Maryland while also fulfilling commissions, pursuing his own art and winning awards. Last year alone, he created three large commissions, received an achievement award and a grant from ArtsFairfax and exhibited smaller works and drawings at DC’s Gallery Neptune & Brown. Awash in luminous hues, the wood pieces on display were inspired by the colorful dress and landscape he found on a summer residency at the Arkad Centre d’Art in Auvillar, France.

While some of Sham’s works are scaled to interior spaces, others have attained monumental size. “Escape Tower,” the tallest at 36 feet, nearly touched the roof above the three-story atrium at American University’s Katzen Arts Center. Weighing three-and-a-half tons, it was created for the museum’s 2017 “Escape” exhibit of Sham’s work.

A more recent piece also proved complex. Commissioned by the Smithsonian, “Mushroom” is composed of 1,760 wood pieces reclaimed from trees that fell or were cut down during construction on the Smithsonian’s grounds: elm, oak, cypress, birch and katsura. The 12-foot-high sculpture was designed in 15 sections, each carefully color-coded and alphabetized for reassembly at the corner of 14th Street and Constitution Avenue, where it’s now on view as part of the “Habitat” show.

Sham often uses local woods but notes, “I have been chasing wood all over the world.” He has worked with camphor wood in China, and built sculptures from woods milled locally in Australia, Hungary, France and Norway during art residencies in those countries. The sculptor keeps jars of sawdust in his studio as a reminder of the distinctive colors and scents of different species.

“I personally like the smell of pine,” Sham says about our region’s fast-growing, readily available wood. However, he points out, when used for outdoor pieces, it requires regular applications of preservative to extend its life beyond 10 years. He often turns to two imported woods that resist the forces of nature for 30 years or more. “Ridge,” a walk-through sculpture in Arlington’s Oakland Park, was constructed of kebony, a treated pine from Norway; it was also sourced for his 28-foot-tall sculpture in the new REI store in North Bethesda. And recently, Sham awaited a shipment from Guyana of greenheart, a hard, dense wood intended for four new sculptures at the corners of 19th & L Streets in DC’s Golden Triangle district.

In many of his sculptures, Sham combines different woods. Plus, he adds, “You can mix wood with steel, Plexiglas, concrete, paper and cast iron,” all of which he has done. A commission currently underway interweaves brick-shaped pine pieces with real books, which were all donated. Scheduled for exhibit at the National Building Museum from November 27 through January 10, 2021, this 26-foot-square sculpture called “Maze of Knowledge” is based on childhood memories, explains the sculptor, recalling a fort near his early home in Macao. “There were different routes, multiple openings. I want as many people as possible to walk through this sculpture.”

Sham credits one aspect of his Chinese heritage for his approach. “I’m always chopping up wood into little pieces—like in stir-fry cooking,” he says good-naturedly, comparing the mix of colors and textures in both.

Looking back, he also traces his method to that first self-portrait. “It’s still my way of working. I construct by adding, building up small blocks into a giant mass to create the structure I want,” he explains. Sham remains exhilarated by shaping art in three dimensions. “You can look at or walk all the way around a sculpture, and sometimes go inside,” he observes with satisfaction. “Think about it: How many ways can you do a sculpture? There are so many possibilities. You will never get tired, never get short of ideas. There is no limit.”

Foon Sham is represented in the DC area by Gallery Neptune & Brown; galleryneptunebrown.com. Find more at foonsham.com. The Smithsonian’s “Habitat” exhibit continues through December 2020; gardens.si.edu.

During extended weeks at home, some have found comfort in returning to the earth—looking at our back and front yards, balconies and rooftops in a new way. I’ve always felt most at ease in places with sidewalks; yet over the decades, I’ve discovered the satisfaction of digging, planting and pruning—striving to reclaim from the always-encroaching wild an environment of modest beauty, rather than one serving a useful purpose.

That perspective changed this year. At the urging of a gardening friend, I took the plunge—as so many have before—finding beauty in growing vegetables and herbs in raised beds. There are abundant benefits to gardening off the ground: not having to bend down as far; starting out with enriched soil; choosing among containers from humble pots and planters to custom-designed raised beds you can construct or commission; or simply elevating and enclosing an existing garden bed.

For an apprentice, raised beds are the perfect way to start small. Best of all, for farm-to-table, you can’t beat stepping outside your own kitchen for fresh lettuce or basil to serve in minutes—clipped at eye level.

Growing your own holds special appeal in times of limited access to fresh produce. That was the case during both world wars, when the government promoted “victory gardens” and families rallied to plant crops at home, in public parks, even in schoolyards. By the end of World War II, victory gardens accounted for 40 percent of all fresh fruits and vegetables consumed in the U.S.

Back then, government pamphlets instructed homeowners on how to cultivate edible plants. For today’s beginners, I asked two experts for advice: Amanda Helin, a gardener at the U.S. Botanic Garden; and Carly Mercer of Love & Carrots, which helps clients plant and maintain vegetable gardens. To raise a garden bed, Helin advises mounding at least six inches of compost within walls—or even better, 18 inches of compost mixed with topsoil—and digging it in deeply with a garden fork; or, for a container, simply filling it with 12 or more inches of commercial potting mix. Convert grass to a raised bed by layering five sheets of newspaper, piling on compost and topsoil, and eventually digging it all together. “Adding leaf compost is a great way to go for really rich veggie garden soil,” she says.

At least six hours of direct sunlight daily are necessary for a vegetable garden to thrive. “Think about commercial agriculture in an open field,” says Helin. “That’s ideal.” Mercer suggests placing tall crops on the north side of a bed, so that shorter ones like carrots, beans and salad greens are not cast in shade as the sun moves across the sky.

Allow space for a plant’s mature size. Tomatoes, for example, can reach five or six feet tall. “If you plant five tomatoes in a space where one should grow, you’ll get five pretty unhealthy plants,” Mercer warns. “If you put one in that space, you’ll get one robust and very productive tomato plant.” She adds that tomatoes also need pruning for good air circulation along with staking, caging or trellising.

Raised beds require more water than those in the ground. In dry, hot summer weather, that may mean watering two or three times a day, according to Mercer, who recommends drip-irrigation systems to deliver water directly to the plant’s roots, where it’s needed.

When it comes to keeping out critters and pests, a 24-inch-tall bed will prevent rabbits from jumping in, while only fencing deters deer. To protect lower-growing crops, Mercer recommends netting.

Plan ahead. Mercer points out that late August is ideal for planting cool-weather vegetables from seed, such as beets, carrots, kale, collard greens and Swiss chard; or starting an herb garden, with potted oregano, rosemary, thyme, chives, parsley and cilantro available at garden centers.

“Fall is a great time to plant crops that you can enjoy into winter,” agrees Helin, naming broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, spinach and bok choy.

In my own Maryland backyard, raised planters are blooming mid-season with lettuce, chard and cherry tomatoes starting to form, as well as a towering trellis of peas beside parsley, cilantro and dill. Tending and watching the plants as they grow, this suburban novice has discovered joy each day, marveling at nature’s miracles and grateful for the link to our edible roots.

Recapturing the sense of wonder inquisitive travelers experienced long ago, Kate Norris leads viewers on a path to discovery through the gentle art of paper collage. Charming and witty, her portrayals of creatures and objects in the natural world impart more than appears at first sight. Up close, as if under a microscope, a plucky rooster, butterfly or boar breaks up into tiny set pieces—beguiling pictures or blank fragments torn from rolls of scenic wallpaper. Each is a building block in an orderly yet crazy quilt.

While the main subjects spring from old scientific illustrations, their assembled parts may send a different message derived from vintage wallpapers. Take the case of a smiling skull. Looming large at five feet tall, its head is a patchwork of light and dark tones. Embedded in its forehead, however, merry costumed figures blend among its monochrome fragments. These gentlefolk frolic alone or in pairs; a woman dances, a man plays a lute. “They are like memories in its head,” Norris notes. “I took really pretty paper and juxtaposed it against a serious image, trying to make it light and beautiful, a saccharine contrast to the idea of death.”

In other pieces, wallpaper elements support the central theme. When asked to create an artwork at the height of the #MeToo movement, Norris based her design on an old illustration of a female bat. With women’s empowerment in mind, she called it “Batgirl”—a new superhero—and overlaid it with a pastoral paper showing countrywomen at work. Within the lush landscape composition, a graceful figure dressed in a cap and apron kneels along the bat wing’s edge, dipping a cloth into the void beyond. “I think of them telling a story as I make each one,” says Norris. “There are stories within stories, associations that I make. I have fun with it.”

Tall and agile, Norris won a basketball scholarship to Stanford, where she studied fine art. She went on to receive a master’s at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Her lifelong interests connect in unexpected ways. “Sometimes I attribute my discipline in finishing a section of an artwork to the perseverance that comes with sports,” she reflects, adding, “You can be creative in sports too.”

Norris arrived at her current technique of repurposing wallpaper barely three years ago. “I was a painter forever,” she explains. Standing in the basement studio of her home in Baltimore’s North Roland Park, she indicates earlier works that demonstrate her longstanding use of cut, mixed-media paper merged into abstract paintings and charcoal drawings.

That abstract approach began to change in 2010, when she started teaching in Baltimore County, now at Parkville High School. “I had to show students how to render things—draw a portrait or paint a landscape. I found out I could do that really easily, and I like it,” reflects the artist, who also created handmade quilts in her 20s. “The way I work now is the culmination of all those years.”

Norris favors toile wallpapers that typically picture wistful scenes of bygone times. Animals and birds, flowers and monuments intermingle with idyllic figures, sometimes in exotic Chinoiserie settings. “They are like little engravings,” Norris observes, adding that once she started ripping up the rolls, “it kind of exploded from there.”

Her muse may arise from a single image or a special paper. To demonstrate the quandary of finding a suitable match, she unfurls a cerulean blue-and-cream sample. It shows a sprightly pattern of Christian Dior storefronts intermingled with shoes, boxes and fitted, fashion-plate suits of a former era. Norris held onto the paper for more than a year before discovering a large seashell image to complement it. When an identical shell rendering turned up in a large tome she bought for herself last Christmas—containing artwork by Ernst Haeckel, a 19th-century zoologist and illustrator—the find compounded her goal of reinterpreting vintage illustrations and “giving homage to some of the old illustrators,” she says.

Norris compares her art to putting a puzzle together. Embarking on a new piece, she draws the image outline on a canvas, then paints around the borders before filling in the background. Rough edges of the paper remain silhouetted against the border, she says, “to allude to old parchment.” After large fragments are placed, one piece builds on another. At the end, each work is sealed and varnished for protection.

The artist remembers returning home for vacations to Redding, California, where she enjoyed doing puzzles with her father. Her collage art poses a different kind of challenge. “You get to make it up as you go along,” she says, smiling. “I don’t know where it’s going when I start—but it always seems to work out.” For more information, see katenorrisart.com.

Inside a converted warehouse south of the James River in Richmond, a white-hot flame darts wildly from a hand-held torch. Sean Donlon, standing at a long workbench, holds the torch in his gloved hand. With the other, he coolly, continuously turns a teapot that minutes before he blew, shaped and assembled from three hollow glass tubes. The intense heat reaches 3,000 degrees, sealing connections between the pot, spout and handle while smoothing out imperfections. With the blow-hose mouthpiece still between his teeth, Donlon continues the conversation.

“I used to want to make each piece absolutely perfect,” explains the 31-year-old artist. “But when I got to that point, I thought it was a little boring.” He started changing details—exaggerating the curve of a spout, punching in and pushing out the body, “owning the ability to manipulate it to what you want it to be,” he says.

Bringing a sense of movement and life to the familiar teapot is just the first step. Equally unexpected, these clear-glass objects take on the illusion of polished silver, a look Donlon achieves by applying a reflective coating to the inside, similar to that on the back of a mirror. He removes any lingering functional associations by mounting his teapots in dynamic, sculptural wall compositions.

From a distance, the playful installations become glittering abstractions. Up close, teapot contours emerge, but not the traditional kind. “They’re misshapen, mis-formed, some are wrinkled, melting, drooping,” the artist says with affection. “I kind of look at teapots as a metaphor for people. We all have perfect parts and imperfections.”

It might be said that Donlon sees the world—and his art—in the teapot. “It’s a universal object that people of all nationalities and languages can identify and understand,” he notes. His contemporary expression has been recognized with honors. In 2016, the first year he entered Richmond’s Craft + Design show, Donlon won best in show. And at the 2019 Smithsonian Craft Show, again his first time exhibiting, Donlon garnered the award for New Directions: Excellence in Design of the Future.

The artist made his first teapot seven years ago, after graduating from Virginia Commonwealth University with a major in Craft/Material Studies. There he advanced his glassblowing techniques, using flame-working to shape molten glass rather than employing a furnace as the primary heat source. He remembers the curriculum as “very concept-heavy,” an approach that plays down utilitarian design in favor of ideas. “I thought of the teapot as a boring, mundane object,” Donlon reveals in disbelief, his crystalline-blue eyes wide open. “It wasn’t until getting out of school that I realized the teapot was actually a really beautiful, staple craft in America.”

He recalls that after fabricating his first teapot, “I was hooked.” Lessons learned as an undergraduate were not lost. Within a year, he had mirrored and hung teapot installations, realizing, he observes, “my own idea of intertwining elements of craft and concept.” After traveling on a fellowship to Lauscha, Germany, and to an invitational class in Murano, Italy, he integrated European influences into his technique.

Now working in a studio shared with seven artists, Donlon retreats to an enclosed space to assemble individual components of his wall pieces. He just completed one commission measuring 13 feet long for the Metropolitan Gallery in Austin. Another major installation hangs in Richmond’s Quirk Hotel. The circular arrangement, which comprises more than 100 teapots and teacups, appropriately adorns a dining area. Standing before the sparkling piece,  Donlon comments on the way its silvery surfaces reflect the colors and activities of its surroundings. “I like that as you move close in and walk past it, you see yourself distorted in the reflections and can interact with the piece in a subtle way.”

The artist’s latest work wedges exuberant teapots into nine- and 12-inch-square frames. The exaggerated forms slink, droop and dissolve upside down in corners—an homage to the drawings of Donlon’s maternal great-grandfather, a cartoonist in Germany.

While he was growing up in Springfield, Virginia, Donlon’s parents encouraged his interest in art. His mother, a former fiber artist, had a studio at the Torpedo Factory. His father, who worked at the State Department, shared a hobby painting miniature soldiers with Sean and his brother.

Donlon discusses his own evolving art with enthusiasm. “I feel like I’ve just touched the surface of using the teapot as a sculptural element,” he says. “I’m excited to see where that goes.” He compares its potential to the myriad impressions created by his teapots over time. “As the light changes throughout the day, you can see how the piece changes,” he reflects. “It’s not always what we think we see that’s right in front of us, but what it turns into.”

Sean Donlon’s art is represented by Page Bond and Quirk galleries in Richmond. seandonlondesign.com 

A spellbinding universe of majesty and wonder unfolds in the luminous paintings of Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi. As if viewed from the stars, fluid bodies interlace with exquisitely detailed patterns. Jewel-hued currents ebb and flow. Yet in these richly atmospheric works, another dimension emerges—all parts do not coexist in celestial harmony. Turbulence flares as sinuous forms collide. Lightning flashes erupt. Black holes appear.

It is an overarching perspective that is also deeply personal, a metaphor for the Persian-American artist’s own existence. Born in Tehran 38 years ago, Ilchi has resided half her life in Montgomery County. “My work is about bridging my two identities,” explains the artist. “I’m kind of split between the two cultures, pulling from their different traditions and techniques.”

From Persian painting and the art of Islamic illumination, Ilchi derives precise patterns and architectural elements. These intricate designs merge with the broad gestures of Western abstraction, particularly the pouring-paint technique associated with Jackson Pollock. “I like mixing those different systems together and creating a new hybrid,” she says.

Ilchi favors Persian art’s ornate borders—elaborately framing abstract imagery—or doorways that mysteriously float on the surface. “Looking at examples in Persian painting and Islamic illumination, there’s always that doorway or border present,” Ilchi notes. “It has a decorative purpose, but it also centers some kind of narrative, beautifying poetry or a sacred text.”

Earlier in her career, Ilchi followed that storytelling tradition, placing figures of her family and friends in the doorways and archways, which now stand empty. “I want them to be liminal spaces, almost like you’re between two worlds, in an uncertain place,” the artist observes. “The figure isn’t there, but it is actually there, because you become the figure. You become the world that those figures existed in.” The ambiguous doorways atop multiple strata conjure a pathway to dreamlike memory as well.

Seated at the work table in her Kensington studio, Ilchi points to motifs from Persian and Islamic art illustrated in oversized books, beside a volume of T.S. Eliot poems. The painter’s love of poetry echoes in the multiple layers of her art and in the titles of her works. A phrase she wrote, “I surrender to you, ashen lands and blue skies,” was the name of her recent exhibition at Washington’s Hemphill gallery.

Although Ilchi attended an art high school in Iran, she knew little about Western art when arriving in the U.S. in 1999 at the age of 18 to join her fiancé. To learn English, she enrolled at Montgomery College, also taking art classes with the goal of becoming a graphic designer—an idea that vanished once she discovered painting. Entering a new culture, she recalls, “was very difficult. With painting, I found a language to express myself and find a footing.” After completing a bachelor’s in fine arts at the Corcoran, she went on to receive a master’s degree in studio art from American University.

During her last undergraduate year, Ilchi first experienced pouring paint onto the slick surface of Mylar. “I really liked what was happening—allowing chance to take over,” she recalls.

As she continued to reimagine that unpredictable process using a similar nonporous, matte-drafting film, she began to see the abstract pours suddenly shift toward realism. “They turn out to look like extraterrestrial images—almost like topographical, aerial views of the Earth, or like photos of galaxies,” she says. To enhance those impressions, the artist studies NASA satellite imagery for inspiration and focuses on colors that resemble landmasses or bodies of water.

Each painting progresses organically. Ilchi may decide to repeat the pours, perhaps spraying on water to let the acrylic paint spread, or lifting the wood or aluminum panels she also uses as her canvas while moving the paint around. At another moment, the artist may choose among Persian patterns she then transfers and paints by hand. Later, she’ll determine which imagery to highlight and which parts to cover with transparent or opaque glazes for balance or added depth. “I’m fascinated by the process—not knowing what the painting will be at the beginning,” she says.

In the end, all steps converge in an overall sense of cosmic beauty. “I want it to feel precious,” Ilchi acknowledges, tracing that value to her early years surrounded by Iranian handcrafts, “from carpet weaving to miniature painting to woodworking,” she remembers. “I grew up with that aesthetic of beauty and attention to craftsmanship.”

Beauty, the artist believes, sparks a seductive entry for viewers who she hopes will remain to contemplate more deeply. “I’m interested in changing the viewpoint, looking at a broader image of our world,” she continues. “These painted patterns are beautiful, but there’s a tension between the very different techniques. It’s about two cultures coming together and having some beauty, some peace. I’m hopeful good comes out of the chaos.”

Hedieh Javanshir Ilchi’s art is represented by Hemphill; hemphillfinearts.com. hediehilchi.com. 

When Susan Goldman entered the studio-art program at Indiana University Bloomington, she planned to become a painter. That was before she took a required class in printmaking. “There was a lot of excitement around the print department,” she recalls. She was intrigued by the creative output of artists working in studios that focused on lithography and etching, intaglio relief and screenprinting. “It was so much more interesting than painting,” she says. “After my sophomore year, there was no looking back.”

Four decades later, that momentum has propelled her in unexpected directions. While continuing to develop her own art, Goldman is also a master printer, collaborating with artists at Lily Press Studio, which she founded in 2000 and where she welcomes renowned local artists including Sam Gilliam and Renée Stout, as well as others farther afield, like Keiko Hara of Walla Walla, Washington.

Goldman returned to the Midwest in 2005 to begin research on a documentary she later produced about seminal mid-century printmakers. More recently, she curated works by 10 trendsetting printmakers for an exhibit on view at American University’s Katzen Arts Center; a companion dance performance at AU will feature her bold geometric prints on costumes she designed in collaboration with choreographer Keira Hart-Mendoza. “Those are my print elements come to life,” says the artist, smiling with pleasure.

Dressed in black, Goldman is a statuesque figure with a modest, kindly manner and gentle voice. She stands in the spacious, light-filled studio that her husband, architect Jeffrey Owens, designed as an addition to their Rockville home. A massive printing press occupies a central position. Everything else—long worktables, neatly organized shelves, a tall rack for drying prints—is on wheels to accommodate most types of fine-art printing methods.

The artist herself works with screen-printing, which involves pulling ink through polyester mesh; monotypes, similar to drawing or painting with ink on a smooth surface; and woodcuts, imprinted from a woodblock that she carves by hand. “I can do singular impressions, limited impressions, or I can print 40 at a time,” she notes. Though her press can handle prints up to 40-by-72 inches, she recently licensed blowups of her designs, enlarged to 60-by-40 feet, for a hotel in Abu Dhabi.

Clipped to the studio’s white walls, Goldman’s latest screenprints radiate brilliant, intensely saturated color. “You need sunglasses,” she jokes. The geometric works in progress contain bullseye or flower-blossom circles decoratively overlaid with blocks, triangles and segmented dots. “I’m playing with what can happen inside a square,” she says. In another vertical group, flattened vases in acid yellow or startling fuchsia cover the lower portion of the sheet or become solid panels of pure color. Like classical Greek columns topped by capitals, these bases are crowned by simple rectangles or rounded targets. Both series represent variations on themes that Goldman has continued to reconfigure over time.

“It comes out of a love of pattern, still life, antiquities,” she explains. It also reflects her interest in simplifying recognizable forms into abstract compositional elements.  Underlying all is a passion for color. “The basic premise is beauty, making the world beautiful,” she explains, “because the world is not always beautiful.”

When Goldman begins a piece, she chooses from a library of some 30 images stenciled on separate screens. Combining images requires a separate printing for each. And every color change involves its own printing, as the layers build. “What will happen when I play with different colors and overlays?” she asks at the start. “Some of it I don’t know until I get going.”

On a recent afternoon, the artist considered those possibilities during the last print run of the day with her skilled assistants, Erwin Thamm and Jermaine Ashman. Heading to the garage, they laid a Victorian-flower engraving, already digitally enlarged and printed out by Goldman, on top of a blank screen coated in light-sensitive emulsion. After exposure to light, the emulsion area hardened, leaving the pattern transferred to the screen and, like an open stencil, ready to be inked.

Back at the worktable, Ashman saturated a squeegee, then smoothly and powerfully pushed and pulled ink—in a color Goldman had blended—through the mesh onto a test paper. Satisfied with the result, Goldman selected one print and then another as the push and pull proceeded. “Several things happen at once, so it helps to have extra eyes on a project,” she observes. “It’s a collaborative type of medium.”

The artist’s love of the process extends from its structured deconstruction, repetition and layering to its playful improvisation and surprises. “There is an element of mystery to what the medium gives you,” she says. “The way it all comes together, printmaking gives back to me a result I couldn’t have seen at the beginning.”

Living in surroundings with the aura of a calm country retreat isn’t generally associated with a city address. But when one Washington couple found a 1930 home on an acre of land across from Battery Kemble Park in the heart of Northwest DC, they seized the chance to realize their hopes—hers to remain in the city where she was raised, his to enjoy a sense of wide-open space that he had experienced growing up in southern Virginia. “This was such a beautiful property, where we could maintain a country feel and bring the outdoors in,” says the husband, who works in commercial real estate.

“It was the perfect city and country combination,” adds the wife, who helps educational nonprofits in urban communities.

The two shared another vision. “First and foremost, we wanted a family home for our children, and we wanted to bring them up in a beautiful space,” she says. To make that happen, they called on Paul Sherrill, a principal in the design firm Solis Betancourt & Sherrill, who had helped with their previous home. A fine collection of American antiques, folk art and paintings, acquired over decades, provided a running start. “I knew the direction they wanted for the interiors—they like the aesthetic and simplicity of a traditional old farmhouse,” says Sherrill.

The home held several timeless attractions. Its whitewashed brick exterior had a weathered beauty. And there was an easy flow of well-proportioned rooms—from the entrance to the back, and from the living room on one side to the kitchen on the other.

Sherrill introduced fresh design elements, beginning at the front door. Its subtle blue shade, inspired by a book on American farmhouses, blends six paint hues with a distressed finish. That understated color continues on garden gates and other exterior doors, as well as on panel doors inside the house. “The color gave us an opportunity to play up the architecture,” says the designer. The same tempered hue, repeated on furnishings inside, ties together old and new parts of the house.

Renovations included a thorough infrastructure upgrade, accompanied by a thoughtful four-story addition on the back by Matthew Fiehn of Barnes Vanze Architects. Unassuming in appearance and clad in whitewashed brick to match the original exterior, the addition spans the width of the residence. In his approach, Fiehn set out to “marry the new work to the existing house, which  was quite lovely. The clients were respectful of its good bones.”

On the main floor, a new family room opens the interiors to light and the lush greenery of orderly gardens, a formal lawn, seating terraces, an allée and themed plantings designed by landscape architect Richard Arentz. On the sloping site’s lowest level, the addition accommodates a new wine room and guest suite, which connect to the children’s playroom and outdoor pool. Two daughters’ bedrooms and baths were added to the second floor, along with an airy new office above.

Throughout the interiors, Sherrill applied a sophisticated toolset to evoke the character of a simple farmhouse. In the family room, painted ceiling beams and wide bead board create a barn-like aesthetic. A section of those planks swings open, allowing a hidden projector screen to drop down. At the push of a button, blackout shades cover the tall, unadorned windows—turning the commodious family room into a comfortable theater space. Twelve speakers located in the room’s chamfered corners are masked with fabric “to make it a little more seamless,” says Sherrill.

Boards and beams are repeated overhead in the breakfast area and kitchen, while reclaimed heart-pine flooring extends the refined rusticity of existing floors into new parts of the house. Sherrill also replaced the home’s traditional bright-white moldings with tan, simple-plank crown “that make it a little more toned down and casual,” he notes.

A soothing, monochromatic palette on walls and ceilings is modulated by sky blue on the family-room mantel, a found antique that now replicates the front door’s color and finish. Soft blues and greens also appear in fabrics on the comfortable seating, much of it brought from their previous home and reupholstered, then complemented with new pieces. Additional antiques arrived as gifts from family members or were searched for as needed—some discovered at Marston Luce Antiques in Georgetown. New bluestone on fireplace hearths “is another unifying element,” says the designer. “We really made an effort to fully integrate the feeling and materials of a simple farmhouse.”

Cheerful colors of nature appear as well in paintings that intermingle or command entire walls. Multiple canvases illustrate different approaches to rural themes by the couple’s favorite artists including luminous colorist Wolf Kahn, folk artist Grandma Moses and John Borden Evans, a family friend whose vernacular style interprets the countryside around his Virginia home. A landscape by renowned French artist Édouard Vuillard hangs in the music room.

“We are about embracing the outdoors,” observes the wife, an enthusiastic gardener who enjoys beekeeping and tending to their vegetable and butterfly-friendly perennial gardens. “There’s a feeling of being at peace here,” she continues. Reflecting on the harmonious environment they have created by connecting their city home to nature and a simpler style, she concludes, “It’s a real privilege.”

Renovation Architecture: Matthew W. Fiehn, AIA, LEED AP, Barnes Vanze Architects, Washington, DC. Interior Design: Paul Sherrill, Solis Betancourt & Sherrill, Washington, DC. Landscape Architecture: Richard Arentz, ArentzLandscape Architects LLC, Washington, DC.

RESOURCES

ENTRY
Sconces: urbanelectric.com. Chair: marstonluce.com. Rug: elsoncompany.com.

LIVING ROOM
Sheers & Red Chair Fabric: rosetarlow.com. Low Boy: marstonluce.com. Sofa, Left: ohenryhouseltd.com. Sofa & Striped Chair Fabric: cowtan.com. Carpet: vermilionrugs.com. Mantel: susquehannaantiques.com. Painting, Left: wolfkahn.com. Corner Chair Fabric: nancycorzine.com. Floral Painting: johnbordenevansart.com. Pillow Fabric: Boussac through pierrefrey.com.

DINING ROOM
Table: mulligansusa.com. Chandelier: marstonluce.com. Painting: johnbordenevansart.com. Host Chair Fabric, Back: robertallendesign.com. Host Chair Fabric, Front: cowtan.com. Dining Chair Fabric: carletonvltd.com.

BEDROOM
Painting: wolfkahn.com. Lilac Fabric on Shades & Shams: bennisonfabrics.com. Bedding: matouk.com. Carpet: classicfloordesigns.info. Corner Chair, Outside Fabric: victoriahagan.com. Corner Chair, Interior Fabric: grovesbros.com. Left Chair Fabric: manuelcanovas.com.

BREAKFAST ROOM
Table: marstonluce.com. Chairs: warrenchairworks.com.

KITCHEN
Light Fixture: obsoleteinc.com. Stools: hickorychair.com.

GREAT ROOM
Painting: wolfkahn.com. Mantel: susquehannaantiques.com. Striped Fabric: larsenfabrics.com. Rug: elsoncompany.com. Table: davidiatesta.com. Ottoman: ohenryhouse.com. Ottoman Fabric: cowtan.com.

MUSIC ROOM
Tablecloth Fabric: cowtan.com

EXTERIOR
Chairs: munder-skiles.com

On a quiet, wintry day, basket maker Tenisha Dotstry sits in the living room of her Capitol Hill apartment, yards of rope piled beside her. She’s been taking apart baskets remaining from the past season and anticipating how to reuse the rope in new designs for spring. “I have so many thoughts about where I want to go with it,” says the artist, her eyes brightening.

Dotstry started making baskets just four years ago. But reaching that point, then learning to construct the minimalist baskets she imagined, represents the journey of a lifetime. Dotstry recalls her first encounter with basket-making a decade ago, when she and her husband, a lieutenant commander in the Navy, were stationed in Charleston, South Carolina. “I used to go the markets and watch the ladies making sweetgrass baskets,” she recalls, referencing that regional African American craft handed down through generations. “I wondered if one day I could figure it out.”

Later, after joining a quilting group in Kingsland, Georgia, she watched as quilters made baskets from thick rope wrapped in patterned fabric. “What would happen if you just sewed rope without the fabric?” she asked them.

“It wouldn’t look right,” they responded. “Nobody would like that.”

That was late December 2014—and Dotstry remembers thinking, “I’m just going to try it so I’ll have a hobby for the new year.” Finding some thick rope at home, she sat down at her sewing machine and was just getting started when she heard a deafening crack: The bulky rope had broken the machine. Undeterred, Dotstry replaced the Kenmore machine with a heavy-duty Singer, found some thinner clothesline at Walmart, and proceeded to make her first basket—which, she says, looked a lot like the ones in the Charleston market.

“That was before I saw how versatile the rope is, how you can sculpt it, and how it works with the machine,” she observes. Over the next two years, through trial and error, she developed a series of functional baskets along with sculptural pieces that tap the potential of rope as a casual, elegant art form.

Starting out with books from the 1980s, Dotstry taught herself to guide braided cord into the sewing machine with her right hand, while holding her left at the correct angle to allow the coils to build into the desired shape—whether a tall vessel, a plump container, a classic vase or an undulating bowl. She settled on unbleached, all-cotton rope of a uniform three-sixteenth-inch thickness, noting, “Even though I’m technically using the same material every time, literally every foot of rope acts differently. Depending on the humidity, it may be softer or harder; it may need more or less tension. I’ve learned to work with the quirks of cotton rope.”

The artist discretely ornaments her one-of-a-kind baskets with plain or scrolled handles—slipped through openings or hand-sewn in place—adding pops of color in zigzag stitches or in waving lines of Swarovski crystals. “I like bling,” she confesses. At the same time, her restraint in composing these simple forms distills traditional basketry to its abstract essence—as in Ten Dots Textiles, the company name that pares down her own.

Just two years after starting to sell her baskets, Dotstry will present her art this year at the American Craft Show in Baltimore and the highly selective Smithsonian Craft Show—where this first-time participant will exhibit in the same majestic hall as Mary Jackson, the renowned master of contemporary sweetgrass basketry and winner of a MacArthur Foundation award.

Dotstry hears her legendary name often. “Every city I go to, every show I’m in, someone asks me, ‘Have you heard of Mary Jackson?’” When Dotstry was accepted into the Smithsonian show, she recalls thinking, “Oh my God, I’ll be in the same place as Mary Jackson!”

Just as Jackson’s weaving tradition was passed down, Dotstry has early memories of sitting at the sewing machine with her mother, who taught her to sew at a young age. And while Jackson has raised the art of basketry to new levels using grasses indigenous to her South Carolina Lowcountry home, Dotstry took up a material common in her world—sailing rope in various forms. “I’ve always lived by the water,” she explains.

Born and raised in Newburg, located between two rivers on Maryland’s southern tip, she joined the Navy after high school, training for two years to become a nuclear electronics technician. “When I’m thinking through new designs,” she says, “my thoughts usually go to water and flowing shapes. It always comes back to the Navy and nautical themes.”

While translating those inspirations into her baskets, Dotstry continues to experiment with new techniques—recently dying rope in brilliant colors. The possibilities have been percolating since those early days at the Charleston market. “Because I’m teaching myself, everything I make is a learning process,” she reflects. “I absolutely love it.”

Tenisha Dotstry’s baskets will be on view at the American Craft Show in the Baltimore Convention Center from February 22 to 24, and the Smithsonian Craft Show in Washington’s National Building Museum from April 24 to 28. tendotstextiles.com.

In a little-known part of northeast Virginia, a protruding puzzle piece of Loudoun County nestles between the borders of Maryland and West Virginia. Here in the gently rolling valley of Short Hill Mountain, a couple with longstanding ties to the Washington arts community found the country haven they had been seeking. Architectural photographer Maxwell MacKenzie and painter-ceramicist Rebecca Cross—partners in Georgetown’s Cross MacKenzie Gallery and in life—settled near picturesque Hillsboro. “The setting was perfectly suited to what we were looking for—very isolated, so peaceful, a slower pace from our DC lives,” says Cross, who is the gallery’s director.

Among the 10-acre property’s many charms, they admired the simple elegance of a 1787 stone farmhouse, along with the possibilities of its five outbuildings to meet their needs for studio space, storage and possible future rental. A clearing on the grounds created the perfect runway for MacKenzie’s ultra-light, powered-parachute aircraft, which he flies when shooting breathtaking aerial photos.

“We were ready for a new chapter in our lives,” explains Cross of their bold step. “You’re supposed to downsize at our age,” she laughs. “We’re doing the opposite.” The move was not envisioned as country retirement; both continue to work from home, and Cross drives 52 miles to their gallery four days a week.

They had a different dream. “We were imagining our children, grandchildren, families and friends visiting,” she explains. After living for 31 years in DC’s Woodley Park, they were ready for a change. The street where they lived had become increasingly noisy and congested. Their grand, six-bedroom townhouse had served them well, but over a lifetime of making and collecting things, notes MacKenzie, “We were bursting at the seams.”

Five moving trucks and two years later, both are relaxing on their farmhouse patio, seated at a long table with matching benches. The couple designed and beautifully crafted the wooden set with butterfly joints and a grainy, glistening surface in anticipation of large gatherings. It’s an ideal spot for gazing past a reflective pool—which they designed to suggest a simple swimming hole—to rows of corn and open fields sweeping to the hazy mountain ridge. The view is protected from development thanks to a neighbor who donated the adjoining acreage to Virginia’s Land Trust.

MacKenzie recalls the happy times they enjoyed over 30 years at Cross’ parents’ weekend house on the Rappahannock River. He tells how her father, Eason Cross, a distinguished architect who was honored as a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, bought the second home “to pull back his children by having this very pretty place in the country,“ MacKenzie recounts. “And we saw that it worked. If you build it, they will come.”

When Cross’ parents and MacKenzie’s mother passed away the same year, “Our lives were disrupted. It made us think about what we wanted,” Cross reflects. MacKenzie’s luminous images—
pictured on these pages—illustrate the place their new country home already occupies in continuing that beloved family tradition. Its warm, welcoming interiors, the serene beauty of its surroundings, the layers of history are an invitation to gather and build memories.

Arranging furnishings inside these solid stone walls presented a delicate challenge for Cross. Unlike at the gallery, where each object is showcased, she allowed the character of the massive fireplaces and richly textured ceiling beams and wood-plank floors to set the stage; artworks are enfolded within. “I wanted to elevate the qualities already here,” she explains, “to respect the age but not any historical moment. Whatever I did, I didn’t want to lose the lovely bones of this old house.”

MacKenzie’s photographs appear throughout, along with other images in their personal collection by photographers Diane Arbus, Joel Sternfeld, Helmut Newton and Eugène Atget. Cross herself has a master’s in painting from London’s Royal College of Art; several of her early paintings and boldly patterned ceramics enliven the kitchen and other rooms. Cross’ festive, colorful plates were bestsellers at Barney’s in New York in the ’80s, her husband proudly points out. And her recent series of pencil drawings depicting ancient weapons hangs in the house and in her studio, where she looks forward to spending more time.

In some ways, the house and its weathered-wood outbuildings and grounds comprise a large-scale art project, as the two direct their creative talents and construction skills toward its renewal. MacKenzie recently turned a deceased boxwood into a rustic patio chair. Cross excavated stepping stones, revived a garden and repainted the exterior of one of the outbuildings, a log cabin. Together, they rebuilt a stone wall, made the patio furniture and, most ambitiously—after watching YouTube videos—replaced wood shingles on the home’s entrance portico. “We’re happy when we’re making and doing things together,” Cross says.

With many projects ahead, they have become converts to country life. Cross takes morning walks before going to the gallery, while MacKenzie enjoys jaunts in his aircraft, often flying nine miles to Harper’s Ferry—part of his research on historic buildings in the area. Friends arrive for days spent hiking, swimming and picnicking in the country.

“We’re feeling gratified because last weekend, our new baby granddaughter came with our son Alex and his wife, who live in Los Angeles. Our younger son, Augustus, a painter, came too. We also had a full house on Thanksgiving and on the Fourth of July,” Cross beams. “Because we have so many bedrooms, everyone can come. It’s really a lot of fun. ”

Interior Design: Rebecca Cross, Cross MacKenzie Gallery, Washington, DC. 

Tucked behind brick walls, a diminutive, remodeled carriage house blends with the grand abodes of its historic Dupont Circle neighborhood while holding its own with a modern presence anchored in the past.

The original two-story structure was built in 1910 during the transition from horse-drawn carriages to cars. It provided quarters for a chauffeur on its second floor, before becoming a small townhouse 50 years later. The latest renovation added a third floor to accommodate owners Beth-Ann and Carmen Gentile, both lawyers, who were downsizing from the large Cleveland Park residence where they’d raised their two daughters.

The coach house had been in Beth-Ann Gentile’s family since the 1960s, when her mother bought and furnished it as a rental; one of her first tenants was legendary newscaster David Brinkley. Eventually her parents moved in, and when the house passed to her, she continued to rent it out—until 2015, when her husband suggested they move in. She had reservations.

“If we were going to live here, I wanted it to be completely different from the way it had been,” she says. “My mother loved to decorate in a very traditional Williamsburg style with brass chandeliers and pineapple statues on the corners of the courtyard walls. I wanted to start with a clean slate.”

Enter architects Amy Gardner and Brittany Williams. They visited the Gentiles in their Cleveland Park home to understand how they lived. “Together we forged this idea,” Gardner recalls. “We wanted the house to be reminiscent of its roots—a little bit garage-y, a little bit coach house-y, a little bit modern, a place that would showcase Beth’s eclectic collection of furniture and objects from all over the world.”

Bringing in light was important too, Gentile adds, and expanding the space was essential. “The net leap was how we would ever get permission from the Advisory Neighborhood Commission and then the Historic Preservation Review Board to build a third floor,” she remembers.

When the project began, the architects found a sequence of chopped-up rooms on the first floor: a tiny entry with a staircase, a cramped kitchen and a dark living room. A recent inspection had uncovered a second entrance, enclosed in cinderblock and covered with drywall, with a hidden window above it. Both openings on the alley side were restored, letting in more light. And new carriage doors were designed by the architects—in homage to the garage’s history—with a row of high windows for privacy. Painted Chinese red, the doors bring a punch of warmth and color to the bright, open interiors.

[metaslider id=39450]

As it turned out, the two-story house was gutted and replaced with a single room on each floor. “We looked at what we could keep, and how much of what existed would fall into the garage-y category,” recalls Williams. They concluded there was nothing—except for the floor structure above the main floor’s nine-foot ceilings. That framing was exposed, then roughly painted. A similar assembly with the same painted finish was built of engineered lumber to support the third floor. The new, light-filled master bedroom on top, in neutral tones and natural woods, is intended as a modern sleeping porch, mirroring a traditional one on the attached house next door.

An open staircase links floors and design themes. “In some ways the stair is a microcosm of the whole place,” notes Gardner. “It’s got wood [on the treads]. It’s got glass. It’s got steel. It’s finished; it’s unfinished. It’s exposed; it’s raw. It embodies all the ideas that we had.”

With just 1,400 square feet of living space to work with, Williams compared the renovation process to crafting a jewel box. “Every dimension was precious. It forced everyone to be really conscientious about design decisions and construction,” she observes.

Those decisions worked out well for the owners. “You don’t feel you’re in a tiny house,” reflects Gentile. “My feeling was that I didn’t want it to look fake. Now it’s back to its simplified garage look.” With family furniture around her, “It looks like home to me.” As she says this,  a grandfather clock—which came with the house when her mother bought it, moved to the couple’s Cleveland Park home and has returned to the place where it started out—chimes from its industrial-style corner.

DRAWING BOARD: AMY GARDNER

How do you preserve the character of a historic house when gutting its interiors?
We research the history, character and details of the house to understand its core identity, then apply that identity to guide decision-making.

How did you get approval to add a floor in a historic district?
The coach house faces the backs of other houses and was dwarfed by its neighbors. We argued that we were operating in a backyard and adding a third floor would bring the house into scale with the others.

What assets can you play up to make small spaces feel livable, even grand?
Ceiling height and abundant light!

How do you pair design excellence with sustainability?
There are many approaches, but the two that rise to the top are passive-energy strategies and high-performance heating-and-cooling systems. Here, we used a green roof [carpeted with plants] to help manage water runoff. It also looks great to neighbors higher up!

Renovation Architecture: Amy Gardner, FAIA, LEED AP, Brittany Williams, AIA, LEED AP, Gardner Architects LLC, Silver Spring, Maryland. Kitchen Design: Jennifer Gilmer and Meghan Browne, Jennifer Gilmer Kitchen & Bath, Chevy Chase, Maryland. Renovation Contracting: Vedad Dedovic and Rod McCoy, Added Dimensions, Takoma Park, Maryland. Landscape Design: Holt Jordan, Jordan Honeyman, Washington, DC.

Delicate magnolia branches dance around a doorway in the sprightly hall mural of an Alexandria home. Beckoning through the open passageway, an elegant, faux-painted table repeats the palest gray-blue of the mural’s leaves and flowers. In the dining room, fabric on slipcovered chairs is embellished with a monogram combining the husband and wife’s initials.

Painting decoratively to resemble whatever is in the hearts and minds of homeowners and their designers is all in a day’s—or several weeks’—work for the talented team of Billet Collins. Painter-in-chief Barbara Billet first called on her oldest daughter, Kellie Collins Hodges, for help 25 years ago. Amy Collins Matthews, the youngest of the three daughters, joined them a decade later. Together, the trio has custom-painted floors, walls, ceilings, furniture, fabrics and many other surfaces. When the pace is brisk, their core team expands to a handful of longstanding associates including Roberta Marovelli, who hand-painted the magnolia mural in the Alexandria home.

Billet Collins’ style spans the design spectrum. “We’ve done graffiti art and we’ve done Greek-key patterns,” says Hodges, seated with her colleagues/family members in the living room of the house in Darnestown, Maryland, where their studio is based and where the sisters grew up. Over the years, the focus of their art has remained constant.

“We care a lot about what the designer and homeowner are saying and about achieving what they want to see,” Billet observes.

One of those designers, Wendy Danziger, recently asked Billet Collins to create a ceiling mural for a 300-year-old stone house in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, based on an antique map. It required nine months of iterations, during which the artists prepared custom samples following each change. Eventually, the expansive 20-by-11-foot mural was charmingly hand-painted on canvas in Billet Collins’ studio and delivered to the site.

Although their work focuses on residential projects, the artists have also brought their expertise to historic properties. When they were asked to apply a historically accurate, fantasy faux-bois treatment to the doors and trim at President Lincoln’s Cottage in Washington a decade ago, Hodges had just completed a course with British marbling and wood-graining master Bill Holgate. The team got it right and has since returned to do touch-ups.

Billet met another challenge at DC’s Decatur House when called in to paint newly installed floorboards to blend in with existing originals. “It had to look exactly the same in color and match the signatures of the artists from 200 years ago,” Hodges notes.

Billet Collins’ own signature draws on far-ranging genres to achieve a fresh, tailored, contemporary look, which suits the Washington region’s prevailing style, described by Billet as “Southern tradition pushed by New York contemporary.” She gained an early appreciation for art, influenced by her father, William Billet, an artist who worked under cover for the CIA and later headed the agency’s graphic-arts reproduction branch. She went on to pursue fine art in Frankfurt, at Indiana University and at the Corcoran.

Her daughters arrived in the business via other routes. Matthews, who also studied art in college, now creates abstract paintings for Billet Collins’ clients and for sale online. Hodges, who has a degree in Russian Studies, was working as a barista on the West Coast when her mother asked for help on a big job in Chicago. Among many tasks, Hodges had to paint a motif across a large floor. “The owner was a famous mathematician, so the layout was kind of important,” Hodges recalls.

“I love math. And I love pattern,” adds Billet, who with her polished techniques and unassuming manner proves that art and math abilities can coexist. When laying out a pattern, she explains, exact measurements are paramount. “Three-quarters of an inch matters. You can’t get to one end and have an element that’s larger.” That sleight of hand takes place in the loft studio above her former garage, where stenciling on two floor cloths is currently underway. To create the illusion of perfect symmetry, the pattern motifs were stretched a quarter inch at a time before any stencils were cut.

That same attention to detail is evident in the spacious, well-ordered studio below. A set of dark chairs awaits lightening glazes, while a brassy metal mirror frame is becoming more muted. “After years of working with the paints, you get to know exactly what the colors will do,” says Billet.

The team always enjoys a fresh challenge. In the house, samples of their designs are displayed on fabric, paper and porcelain. They surmounted a steep learning curve to produce limited-edition place settings in a cheerful pattern of Ottoman curves and clean, contemporary geometry. The line came about after Nadia Subaran of Aidan Design asked if they had any hand-painted porcelain. “Yes, we do,” Hodges recalls replying, and waits a beat before she adds, “That’s our answer for everything.”

Billet Collins’ services are available through designers; their products can be purchased at billetcollins.com. 

Full Circle Ben Marcin likes to tell the stories, real or imagined, behind each photograph he thoughtfully composes. Here’s one. Location: 4006 Pulaski Highway, Baltimore. Background: House once inhabited by a gypsy. History: One day a young man entered and had his fortune told. He went away, thought about it, and decided he didn’t much like what he heard. “Then,” Marcin continues in the same cool tone, “he came back with a saw and cut her head off. That’s a true story. I have the article.”

Twenty years later, in 2014, he snapped a picture of the dwelling. Known locally as the Gypsy Murder House, it had remained empty all those years between a power station and a Dunkin’ Donuts. “Nobody wanted to buy the house. It was haunted, right?” Marcin suggests. “Until someone finally said, ‘Let’s knock the place down.’”

In 2017, he photographed the site again. Power lines shadow one side of the cleared lot, its clay soil leveled like a fresh grave. A bright orange crane looms opposite. “They extended the Dunkin’ Donuts’ parking lot there,” Marcin notes as a postscript. “That Dunkin’ Donuts has become quite popular.”

The diptych portraits are part of his “Last House Standing” series. Taken mostly in Baltimore, the pictures document solitary row houses, stripped of attached neighbors or isolated on demolished blocks—lone survivors of a vanishing species.

He points to a house in the series, its elegant cornice has fallen into decay, and others marred by peeling paint or bullet holes. “These houses were meant to last forever, but they couldn’t withstand what society did to them; so to me they represent an act of defiance,” he says.

“They are old row houses, like the one we’re standing in now,” he continues, referring to his own home and workplace less than five miles from the notorious gypsy site. “The fact that they are still standing is quite rare. You don’t see them often.”

For 20 years, he and his wife, Lynn Marcin, have lived in a grand 19th-century townhouse on an intact Baltimore block— the epicenter for the most regional locations illuminated in his poignant and classic photographs.

About five years ago, Marcin started mixing it up. Still aiming his lens downtown, he began shooting urban office buildings, parking garages, and warehouses. “I like structures,” he says. But rather than representing them realistically, he telescopes in on segments of the buildings, taking close-up views that become abstract blocks in a larger grid.

Holding up one sheet with a lattice of parking-garage images, the photographer explains, “From a distance, these look like a series of abstract patterns. Getting closer, you can see that they are garages and maybe recognize, ‘Oh, I park there!’” While similar in style, his “Tower” series employs a completely different technique. Each is a single, tightly cropped shot. “2400 Chestnut Street,” a high-rise condominium in Philadelphia, appears as a network of dots and dashes, as on an electronic circuit board.

“The whole point,” Marcin explains, “is maybe a thousand people live in that building, and I’ve reduced them to this generic, cogs-in-a-wheel type of thing. Unlike with the row houses, which are really, really personal, this looks like a dystopian honeycomb.”

His photographs of museums push the level of abstraction to the limit. Instead of taking pictures of well-known artworks or identifiable architecture, Marcin isolates anonymous aspects of the buildings’ infrastructure. Walking the length of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Egyptian Wing, he shot only close-ups of track lighting above the gallery’s display cases. From those hundreds of individual photographs, he later compiled a jazzy, earth-toned mosaic. At Baltimore’s historic Walters Art Museum, Marcin skipped the formal galleries and headed to its student center in the basement, where photographs of its brightly painted walls were turned into a crazy quilt of dazzling colors.

“My earlier work is more representational, more recognizable,” the photographer says about his stylistic development, adding, “I’ve continued to shoot in a representational format, but the presentation is more conceptual.”

Marcin is frequently asked whether he takes one image and copies it hundreds of times. “Each is a different image,” he responds, “just slightly different but different enough so that it doesn’t look like an artificial copy, a factory design.”

If anyone could reproduce images in a flash, it would be Marcin. During the 30 years he has pursued his art, he also worked full-time as a computer programmer and senior software developer at the Social Security Administration near Baltimore, retiring three years ago to focus on photography full-time. During those decades, while putting in eight-to-10-hour days at the office, he returned home to work in his darkroom. At first printing color pictures using an enlarger and the Cibachrome chemical process, he later transitioned to a “digital darkroom” that includes a computer, a scanner and two Epson printers, all calibrated so that colors come out the same on a print of any size.

Marcin’s recent abstractions revisit an early interest in modern art, dating back to a time when his father, who worked at the Library of Congress, tried to inspire his talented son by bringing home art imagery. Indifferent back then to the art of Michelangelo, Bellini and “cherubs in the sky,” he says, he responded to the abstract paintings of Jackson Pollack and Helen Frankenthaler. “Their creative process was very interesting to me. I wanted to do something like that with the camera.”

Initially, Marcin shot pictures of walls and landscapes with a small 35 mm camera while visiting exotic places—Guatemala during its civil war, Mexico, India, China. “I was traveling for myself. Once the photography took over, I was traveling for the photographs,” he says. Since that time, the photographer has turned to a variety of cameras suited to different jobs, from a wooden, four-by-five, large-format field camera to a Canon digital single-lens reflex to a Nexus 6P cell phone.

While the style of his pictures has evolved, the subjects have shifted closer to home. “It’s kind of the story of life,” he reflects. “When you are young, you want to go out and see the wider world. As you get older, you start to see that some of the most exotic stuff happens right down the street. As an artist, you start to understand that some of the most interesting things can be found just around the corner.”

That process of distilling his ideas has brought him full circle. “I’m thinking my next series will be called ‘Around the House,’” he says. “I’ll be shooting right here, in the laundry room. I won’t even have to leave the house!”. This positive thinking will definitely lead to success.

Marcin’s photography is represented by C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore; cgrimaldisgallery.com. For more information, see benmarcinphotos.com. Photos courtesy of C. Grimaldis Gallery.

Core ValuesLeaving a stretch of farmland along Maryland’s Eastern Shore, the car pulls up beside a workshop nestled beneath towering chestnut oaks. A frisky German Shepherd darts from the woodland in welcome, pressing its nose against the car window. As it trots away, three guinea hens vigorously follow in line. Massive logs piled next to the workshop glimmer with a silvery patina in the pale autumn light—deepening the sense of having entered a charmed natural realm.

This is the world of Vicco Von Voss Furniture and Timber Framing. It’s the place where salvaged trees are transformed into sculptural, sinuous furniture and hand-hewn posts and beams. It’s the site where each one-of-a-kind object that’s produced has been designed and constructed, as well as milled, dried, cut and polished. And it’s the workshop where age-old techniques of fastening and framing live on—as in the 1,000 wood pegs that hold the building itself together.

“My work is about giving respect back to the tree and where it came from,” says Von Voss, sitting in the open office of his barnlike workshop, overlooking heavy machinery and hand tools arranged below. “If a tree takes 80 years to grow, it is my responsibility to design and build a chair that will be comfortable and last that long. Form and function should work together,” he notes, “or it’s not sustainable. What I’m creating is not just for clients, but also heirlooms for their children.”

Von Voss’s commitment to sustainability is a way of life on his five-acre property south of Chestertown, where his workshop, home, edible garden, barnyard animals and beekeeping operations are located. Nearly all the wood he selects is gathered locally from fallen trees—familiar cherry, walnut, and maple set off by more exotic yellowwood, ginkgo, mulberry, and pear.

Outside his workshop door, he uses a sawmill to cut the logs into slabs—some several hundred pounds each. Others are sliced into boards, which are dried outdoors on racks. “The drying time for a typical three-inch slab is a decade,” Von Voss observes, adding that wood scraps are not wasted, but tossed into a nearby furnace that heats his workshop and home. “Milling my own wood takes a lot of time and energy,” he says. “However, I like to be in control of my materials.”

Those powerful exertions preface the mighty creative energy expressed in Von Voss’s dynamic designs, which range in utility from a small tabletop poised on elongated legs of gazelle-like grace to his own two-story, timber-framed house, with its rounded roofline designed to mimic the canopy of surrounding trees.

From inside the house looking out, a tranquil scene at the tip of nearby Island Creek is framed by a pair of book-matched maple timbers that naturally bend toward each other. The woodworker’s wife, Jacqui, calls their home’s handcrafted aesthetic “my dream house…like living in a piece of art.”

Whether building a piece of furniture or a timber-frame structure, Von Voss applies the same traditional construction methods, based on mortise-and-tenon joinery in which two pieces of wood fit together—one project, the other cut out. “It’s just a question of scale and refinement,” he says about the differences.

Each project also reflects Von Voss’s reverence for the cycles of nature embodied in the wood’s core, along with the spiritual relationship between craftsman and material. When starting a new design, he reflects, “I look at a slab of wood and see a straight edge here, a curved edge there, a beautiful grain pattern that has the terrain of the earth; those will determine the design. Instead of trying to manipulate the material, the journey is more about stepping back and listening to the wood, letting it guide me to what it wants to become.”

For one major new residential commission, Von Voss searched for months before finding the perfect specimen among stacks stored in his workshop. Pulling out three small slabs cut from the final curly-maple flitch, he showed how the pieces will be fitted together, carved, manipulated and polished to a glass-like sheen to suggest the flow of a river. The client, who has moved away from the shore, wants to recreate the feel and touch of the waterfront; the extended piece will start out as a mounted wall shelf, and turn a corner before transitioning to become a tributary-like stair rail. “It pushes all the boundaries,” Von Voss explains, “an art installation that will also serve as a functional handrail.”

Later, on a tour of his completed works on view at Carla Massoni Gallery in Chestertown, he points to examples of his latest explorations in mixed media. Collaborating with metal artist Blake Conroy, Von Voss constructed the shapely table and two shelves, laser-cutting indentations into the wood, then inserting Conroy’s bronze, brass and copper cutouts. All parts seamlessly merge in pieces finished to a silken surface.

Tall and lanky with well-defined features and dressed in traditional work clothes, Von Voss is the very model of a classic woodsman. Born in Germany, he learned to carve wood at the knee of his grandfather, a forester. Following the career path of his father, an international businessman, Von Voss grew up on several continents. When his parents finally bought land near Chestertown, his destiny took a different turn. “I fell in love with this area,” he beams.

He graduated as an art major from Washington College in Chestertown in 1991 and then returned to Germany to complete a three-year woodworking apprenticeship.

Before purchasing his current property, Von Voss lived there for eight years—in a cabin without electricity or running water. “Above my bed was a big window, and I would look at the stars at night and wake up looking at trees,” he fondly remembers. “Living like that affects the way you interact with nature. Woodworking helps you understand what the life of a tree is like,” he reflects while gesturing outdoors to the changing season. “When trees turn colors like right now, it’s magical.”

For more information, visit vicco vonvoss.com or call 410-708-4698.

Watching a new house go up in the family-friendly neighborhood they had been eying for a year, a couple with two children took note. Once the home’s wood framing was in place, they realized that its generous scale and open spaces matched the layout they had been searching for. And they welcomed the chance to begin again with a fresh style of living ideal for their growing family.

“It was amazing to have a blank slate to start with,” says Amy Sherman, who with her husband, Stuart Sherman, CEO of the digital marketing firm SM Marketing International, purchased the house two years ago in the Luxmanor section of North Bethesda. “We wanted a modern feel, and to push that further with a casual California vibe. Nothing too formal,“ says Amy, a marketing executive at Marriott International.

Moving from a home with tighter quarters, the couple happily anticipated the easy flow from room to room and the panoramic outdoor views. They imagined furnishing the house in a way that would treat the core living areas as a single space, serenely unified throughout. “We wanted it to be clean and crisp, but warm, inviting and cozy too,” Amy explains.

To realize their goal, they turned to interior designer Zoe Feldman Jantzen, with whom they had worked in the past and who shared their vision. Having grown up in a Mid-Century Modern house on Florida’s west coast—and worked with Alexa Hampton, one of Manhattan’s premier tradition-based designers—Jantzen has an outlook rooted at the crossroads of comfortable classic and modern design.

When she arrived, the house was still under construction. Custom builder Jeffco Development and the owners had already selected many finishes—in the kitchen, on the wood-paneled and beamed ceilings, and throughout—so Jantzen nimbly extended that base of neutral colors and natural materials. Meanwhile, the Shermans decided to reproduce her designs for the office and master bedroom in their former home “down to the grass-cloth-accent wall in the master bedroom,” says the designer. Despite duplicating the look in those rooms, almost everything else in the house is new. “It was an incredibly clean palette,” she notes, “a beautiful canvas to start with.”

Starting over can be exciting. Still, furnishing a home on the scale of 7,900 square feet inspired mixed feelings for Jantzen. “When I’ve worked on smaller residences in Manhattan and DC, it’s easy to make them feel warm and finished,” she says, “In a larger home, there’s more to fill in and more of a challenge to keep it feeling collected and cozy.”

To create a sense of warmth, Jantzen introduced organic materials with a range of woods and metals in furniture and lighting. Varied fabric textures help too, from nubby bouclé and linens to smooth leather and silks. In a household with eight- and 10-year-old boys, as well as a pet Maltipoo, the designer took the sensible step of protecting the light fabrics. “We used Sunbrella and other performance fabrics that can take a beating but don’t look like low-maintenance materials,” she says.

As a crisp backdrop to the largely white interiors requested by the owners, interior window and door trim was painted black. “We wanted to make the frames look like black steel, which I think is pretty against the white,” says Jantzen. That graphic contrast outlines panels by Jeld-Wen that fold back and completely open the living room to the enclosed sun porch.

Touches of pattern and color surface in art and decorative objects, including books. Beside a bookcase in the main living area, paired side chairs stand out with their intense apple-green mohair seats. Hanging on an opposite wall, a tall artwork panel incorporates dried moss in a flowing composition. “It appears as a vertical garden tying into the modern, organic space,” notes the designer, adding, “Especially in a house like this that’s clean and light with very white walls, it’s really important to add interest with art.”

Owner Stuart Sherman enjoys living with that art. Several pieces that he found are now displayed in his handsome home office next to the front door. One raw, abstract painting by New York artist Paul Gerben anchors the wall behind a modern Chesterfield sofa covered in butterscotch velvet, and a sparkling nickel-and-glass coffee table—a classic mix of design elements with verve.

Another brilliantly hued work by the same artist lights up a long wall in the cocoon-like butler’s pantry. Jantzen matched its deep navy walls to the color of the existing cabinets, then paneled the bar’s backsplash in coordinated, asymmetrical tile. “This is one of my favorite spaces; it’s moodier, with a ’70s influence,” she says.

The adjacent dining room in smoky gray is enriched by floor-length, forest green-silk drapes. Its vintage table sat for 40 years in the dining room of Stuart’s parents, before it turned out to be the perfect size and style for its new setting. “We had looked at this table forever and suddenly saw it in a new light,” recalls Amy.

Since moving in, the family congregates in that room for Thanksgiving dinner. And they gather every Friday on black-leather armchairs for “movie night” in the tiered lower-level theater room. Another favorite spot is the sun porch. Amy describes the family’s all-season enjoyment of that space: “In spring and fall, we open the windows and love the fresh air and feeling of nature all around,” she observes. “When the snow falls, it’s beautiful, especially with a fire in the fireplace. It’s a very relaxing, super-cozy environment.”

Architecture: Doug Roberts, GTM Architects, Bethesda, Maryland. Interior Design: Zoe Feldman Jantzen, Zoe Feldman Design, Inc., Washington, DC. Builder: Jeffco Development, Rockville, Maryland.

RESOURCES

ENTRY  Console: noirfurniturela.com. Chandelier: circalighting.com. Art over Console: naturalcuriosities.com. Rug: kravet.com.

DINING ROOM  Chandelier & dining chairs: rh.com. Drapery Fabric: hollyhunt.com. Drapery Fabrication: gretcheneverett.com. Sideboard: mrbrownhome.com. Rug: centuryfurniture.com. Dining Table: Vintage.

LIVING ROOM  Sectional & Fabric: rh.com. Throw Pillows: americaneyewdc.net. Coffee Table: wisteria.com. Console: bakerfurniture.com. Etagére: jaysonhome.com. Chairs with Green Fabric Seats: olystudio.com. Eames Chair, Ottoman & Fabric: hermanmiller.com

SUNROOM  Sofa & Fabric: rh.com. Round Table, Chairs & White Chair with Wood Frame: gloster.com

KITCHEN  Counter Stools: cb2.com. Breakfast Table, Chairs & Light Fixture: westelm.com.

BUTLER'S PANTRY  Wall Tile behind Bar: waterworks.com. Countertop: White Quartz.

OFFICE  Desk, Coffee Table & Art above Sofa: Owners’ collection. Desk Lamp: tomdixon.net. Sofa: leeindustries.com. Fabric: scalamandre.com. Leather Sling Chair: cb2.com. Ceiling Treatment: thibautdesign.com. Rug: dashandalbert.com.

BEDROOM  Wall Treatment: thibautdesign.com. Bedstead: Owners’ collection. Bench: olystudio.com. Nightstands: redfordhouse.com. Side Table: globalviews.com. Global Views. Rug: Vintage.

Circle of Life Artist Linling Lu, who left China in 2006 to study painting at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, now lives and works in a townhouse a short walk from MICA. On a balmy fall morning, she cheerfully ushered a visitor into her studio. There, the foundations of her pulsating paintings and other colorful arts are arrayed in orderly rows. Small containers hold color samples from recent paintings; rice-paper notebooks record hues applied in earlier paintings; and fragments from vintage Chinese embroideries lie in a tidy queue ready for use in the composite pieces she calls “fabric paintings.” On the floor, sculptures-in-progress are arranged according to the number of wooden blocks in each. “Working with different materials keeps me grounded, aware of where I am and where I came from,” notes Lu. The artist answered questions about her work, on exhibit through December 16 at Hemphill Fine Arts (hemphillfinearts.com) in Washington.

Your painting appears straightforward—concentric circles of color radiating from a bull’s-eye. But it’s not so simple. Please explain.
Colors are instruments with their own sounds. When I assemble colors into a complex circular instrument, they choose their vibration frequency and make outstanding symphony.

What compels you about the circle?
The circle is a symbol of something complete and perfect, balanced and everlasting. Every ring is an endless path. Following each path with layers of paint is an everyday practice of listening to intuitive voices located in the inner center.

One piece in the gallery exhibition combines a painting and an arrangement of smaller wooden blocks. What is the place of sculpture in your work?
Each piece in the installation is independent. They gather just for this moment.

What’s involved when you sit down to start a painting?
I make color and composition studies before starting. Most of the time I stretch my own canvases, prime and sand them. It takes a few simple tools and steps: a compass to draw, several brushes for applying prepared paints and days of free-hand painting and color adjustments. It’s a very systematic process.

Your vibrant pieces have been linked to the Washington Color School movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, known for large color fields of paint. Do you see your art as descended from that movement?
I came with a different background and became aware of the Washington Color School movement and color-field painting during my five years at MICA, where I earned a master’s in fine art. These inspirations together with roots from another culture have developed my work as a hybrid of different cultures and art traditions.

The hand of the artist and brushwork—characteristic of Chinese calligraphy and landscape painting—are absent from your work. Why? My strong interests in geometry, math and order started when I was a child. With professional training in landscape architecture at Beijing Forestry University, I learned techniques to draw complicated things in a mathematical way. I like viewers to see themselves in a painting before seeing me.

Did growing up in southwest China’s rural Guizhou province influence your art?
I grew up in a mountainous city where industrial factories were developing, and more than 30 tribal minorities were scattered. I have beautiful memories of the colors of the mountains, rivers, sky, people’s laughter and colorful clothing.

How do public and private commissions fit into your work?
I see commissions as stages for groups of individual paintings to gather and interact in a theatrical setting. Some public collections—including one at CityCenterDC that contains my largest circle (108 inches in diameter) and one at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing—have given me tremendous freedom to create different characters and relations.

Your name sounds poetic, balanced and alliterative—all in three syllables. Does it have special meaning in Chinese? How has it affected your direction in art or in life?
Lin is a character representing Qi Lin, a magical animal. It brings luck and good energy to places it travels. Ling means flying above the clouds. Lu is an ancient Chinese family name; its character combines two mouths and has a relation to music and instruments. All together, it is a meaningful and beautiful name to me, and it has taught me many wonderful things. It suggests to me to be curious and imaginative, and it links my experiences to music. I was trained as a classical pianist since age four, and I find that music and painting are inseparable and resonate to each other. The combination of these three characters is unique. I googled it and so far haven’t found a second person using this Chinese name. It sets a high standard for me to follow—work hard, be respectful and bring good things to the world.