An Artist Finds His Third Act In A Redesigned Victorian Schoolhouse


DAN McCarthy was the resident of a magnificent Victorian schoolhouse at the foot of the Catskill Mountains and realized that a building lives more than one life like a person. In 2014, at the age of 52 and in what he calls the “end of the second act,” the artist packed up his nearly 30-year-old apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and started a new life a few hours north of Manhattan. It is a three-story, Romanesque stone structure with an impressive Dutch gabled roof and panoramic views of the Hudson Valley. The move, though overwhelming, provided instant relief. Ceramics was a welcome shock to McCarthy’s career – two months before he left town, Anton Kern, the gallerist at the time showed off a series of his impressive clay pot Facepots – but sales of his crudely rendered oil paintings weren’t what they were in the 1990s; Her biggest dream was to escape the market-oriented art scene of New York.

“I wasn’t a hot teenager anymore,” McCarthy, now 59, says as he puts a plate of Humboldt Fog cheese into the open kitchen one afternoon in early December. In the adjoining dining area, light seeps through sheer denim curtains on which she has drawn grid-like patterns with bleach from the mustard machine. noren He had seen him and his two younger sisters at the temple in Los Angeles, where his Japanese-American mother took him as children. Nearby, in an airy living room, a rock sculpture by the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone and a Donald Judd-inspired divan made of sea-level fir plywood adds to the meditative vibe of the space. “I moved to New York to be famous,” she says. “But at some point, I realized that the greatest thing would be freedom. … Being disconnected from the city meant disconnecting from the person I was there.” (Obviously, one of the only pieces of her home that reminds me of New York – strips of framed photo booth self-portraits by Andy Warhol torn from an auction catalog – is in the basement with its two ovens.)

If McCarthy was ready for his third act when he got out of town, maybe the house was, too. Built as a gift to the community in 1899 by Lysander Lawrence, a wealthy New Yorker who spent the summers at neighboring Catskill Mountain House with his wife, the elementary school opened its doors in 1901 and remained operational until 1977. Shortly after McCarthy moved in but before he started planting trees in the front yard, he says the property was “really accessible”; strangers would come without notice and ask for a tour, wondering what had happened to their old class.

The nearly 9,200-square-foot mansion—symmetrical and fierce, as if he had reinterpreted the Wes Anderson Overlook Hotel—was showing signs of neglect until the jewelery designer’s time. Steven Kretchmer Bought in the 1990s. Kretchmer replaced the arched windows and revolving portholes, many of which had been smashed by vandals; new red oak floors installed; He restored the chalkboards that surrounded the dining room and punctuated the second-floor living room. At the same time, its heavy wooden doors leading from these common areas into a great hall preserved the home’s resounding heart, a painted dark auburn with a cathedral ceiling that extends beyond the original cornice to a height of 26 feet.

On a net of tables and chests, McCarthy displays what he calls his “greatest hits”: vessels painted bright yellow, adorned with ornamental birds or small anthropomorphic teacups, standing on four small legs, tied with string, zipped and shrunken. painted and glazed and gooped. What they all have in common is an enigmatic smile, a motif McCarthy first discovered while a student at the San Francisco Art Institute in the 1980s. In the summer of 2012, Davis visited again at the University of California when he was engaged in ceramics. He remembers thinking, “I should put a face on them or something.” “I tried to resist that urge, but as soon as I did, I knew this was what I wanted to do.”

After Kretchmer’s death in a motorcycle accident in 2006, his daughter Claudia took over and later sold it to McCarthy. She was staying with friends down the road when she noticed a real estate sign in front of the school that looked “oddly foreboding and magical.” In a way, it offered the artist everything that New York could no longer offer: silence, an opportunity for reinvention, and a jolt of adventure. “I initially made a conscious effort not to shower for weeks at a time,” she says, citing Huck Finn as her inspiration. “I wanted to be completely wild.” At one point he invited a “spiritual person” and asked him, “The man you bought the house from? He did all this for you. And now it’s your turn.’ He was telling me that I didn’t really own this house, that I had been in it for a while.”

McCarthy is determined to make this place his own as long as he stays here. Although most of the building’s restoration was completed long before he moved in, its impact is still felt in the subtle personal touches: a series of rough-hewn candlesticks on a window sill, resembling a pair of Paleolithic bonbons made by his ceramist girlfriend. and former art director Paula Greif; Basic wheel launch containers by a hero-American potter, on a saw-foot rubber-topped dining table that McCarthy built from a solid-core door Robert Turner. Almost everything in McCarthy’s house once belonged to someone else – or was once something else entirely. And that’s the point: the entire ornate mosaic vase made by the New York-based artist out of broken teacups has the promise of renewal. Joan Bankemper To the mismatched chairs he bought from sidewalk sales and antiques shops on the Hudson and now surround the dining table.

McCarthy is painting the ground floor. (He sleeps on the second floor, one floor above, but keeps a small, cloistered bedroom next to his studio for when he works late at night.) In a way, his workshop serves his idyllic, sun-kissed memory. The first act is where he hides his memories. The taxidermy fish he found online adorn the area, reminding him of his late 70s working on fishing boats as a teenager. In an east-facing room where morning light bathes his art in a rosy glow, acrylic paintings stretched across half-moon canvases resemble psychedelic rainbows, many with simple phrases evoking people and places from their youth: “The Damned” (a band), “The Starwood” (a rock venue), and ” Infinity Surfboards” (a shop). “These were the paintings I did when I first moved here,” he says. “Maybe it was a way to go back to a time when I felt comfortable and safe.” On the opposite wall are his 18 most recent paintings, which he spent the last two years finishing. In these canvases, people dance naked, arms outstretched in fits of ecstasy, unaware of the rainbows streaming directly over their heads.

Reaching the bottom of the stairs leading to a whitewashed basement, he stands before a monumental display of luminous Facepots ranging in height from 18 to 22 inches: row after row of creations, which, in turn, and somehow all appear at the same time, stupid, surprised, malicious, sarcastic, optimistic, cheerful and downright unbalanced. They feel how we want them to feel, or maybe they feel how we feel. “The mood changes from pot to pot,” he says over the jingle of the cauldron. “They come out into the world and come to people in different ways. It is we who make them ours and fill them with meaning. After all, they’re just ships.” The same can, of course, be said for the rooms that surround us.



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