STYLE : DESIGN : Over the Rainbow

When Jane Gottlieb moved into her Santa Monica home last spring, one of the first things she did was get rid of many of its vast white walls. Not a strange impulse for an artist whose work consists of hand-painted Cibachrome photographs that seem to glow in lilac, pink, turquoise and yellow. Today, the two-story house boasts bold strokes of color--inside and out.

A rainbow palette focuses attention on Gottlieb’s art as well as her furniture and collections of glass, old postcards and ceramics. Interior features serve as her canvas: Bookshelves are grape, doors lemon, walls periwinkle and banisters multicolored. Only a few white walls and areas of wood trim remain.

The exterior is no shrinking violet either. “The color draws your eye outside and expands the size of the house,” Gottlieb says. Outside her kitchen window, a wall of pink and fuchsia provides a striking backdrop for an espaliered bougainvillea. Elsewhere, Gottlieb erected a 12-foot-tall wall of lilac and yellow to hide the vacant lot beyond. Mirrors reflect the house and its inhabitants--an ever-changing outdoor gallery.

Gottlieb developed her passion for color early on. When she was 8, she attended painting classes with her mother; at 10, she snapped pictures with a Brownie camera; at 12, she had her first art show in school. Then, in the mid-’50s, she caught a Vincent van Gogh retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that greatly influenced her: “I was amazed by the colors.”

Will Gottlieb eventually paint every surface in sight? She retains a resident house painter for continual touch-ups, but she admits, “I do have to stop myself once in a while.”