Let there be color
Along Palms Boulevard in Venice, just east of Lincoln Boulevard, residents have enlivened a stretch of otherwise ordinary tract homes with the occasional architectural flourish: a pop-up addition here, a bowed-bamboo fence there.
Nothing, however, is quite as eye-catching as the house of Cheri Pann and Gonzalo Duran.
The Mosaic Tile House, as it is called, has shades of Antonio Gaudi’s spectacular spires, the Watts Towers and the Emerald City, complete with yellow brick -- well, tile -- road. The creation bespeaks whimsy and romance.
“It’s a monument to love in the midst of really chaotic times,” Pann says.
Indeed, as longtime “significant others,” artists Pann and Duran have embraced the dual motifs of harmony and love. They both paint and sculpt, but tile is the medium they share most intimately.
Brightly hued mosaic tiles, figurines, miniature tea sets and smashed-up plates are cemented onto walls, inside and out. Coffee mugs, handles poking out for the grabbing, line window frames. What was once the front lawn is coated in shards of mirror, handmade tiles and pieces of garage sale pottery, in vivid yellows, reds, greens and blues.
Just inside, the exuberant kitchen is an almost indescribable cacophony -- the colors are that loud. It comes complete with a handcrafted table embedded with a bright yellow foot-tall ceramic Tweety Bird.
As many home remodelings do, theirs started simply enough.
Pann, a painter, potter and sculptor, bought the house in 1994. The interior was a wreck; the beige stucco exterior unacceptably bland.
What attracted Pann, 62, was the enormous backyard, where she soon set about erecting a studio the size of a small barn. At its skylighted peak, the sun-splashed space is 20 feet tall. Two of the 16-foot walls are covered with grim mural-size works that are her commentaries on the Persian Gulf War and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Pann speaks reluctantly of these pieces, preferring to point out a wall filled with her portraits of Duran, her four kilns, the artfully askew wine goblets she makes for clients and the piles of handcrafted tiles just waiting for spots on a wall or a pathway. The kilns share a room behind the main studio with Duran’s surrealistic works, painted in the hot colors of Mexico. Some clients have dubbed him the Mexican Marc Chagall.
After the studio was built, the couple decided to jazz up a couple of drab bathrooms with tile. One room led to another -- and another.
Pann grew up in East Los Angeles. As a youngster, she drew and colored everything in sight. Her mother envisioned her as a performer and sent her to piano, dance and acting lessons. But at 18, Pann went to a Van Gogh retrospective and there, standing before one of his paintings, she proclaimed herself an artist.
She studied printmaking, drawing and ceramics at UCLA, USC and Cal State Los Angeles. From the late 1960s to the mid-’90s, she exhibited in California and Japan. These days, she exhibits exclusively in her studio at the Mosaic Tile House.
Born in Mexico, Duran, 59, immigrated to Los Angeles as a boy. He is named for his father, who gained fame in Boyle Heights as a maker of flamenco and folklorico shoes for Mexican and Spanish dancers. The elder Duran died last year.
Duran, who studied at the Otis Art Institute and Chouinard School of Art, has worked for many years at Nova Color, a Culver City artists paint store where Pann was a regular. One day at the shop, she said, “we just started kissing.”
Eleven years later, they enjoy salsa dancing and pedaling their tandem bicycle on 60-mile loops through the region, snapping up ceramic treasures and plastic toys at garage sales, bamboo-like stems from the San Gabriel River and tree pods in Bellflower. Friends leave broken plates at the doorstep, knowing they will find new life on a wall or path.
Each weekend, Duran spends eight to 12 hours incorporating their finds into what Pann calls the ultimate “honey, do” project.
The house attracts so much attention from passers-by that the couple, often clad in paint-spattered black jeans, lead Saturday tours. Outside, visitors lounge on benches, one of which is a converted bathtub, bathed in tile. It’s also the spot where Pann and Duran spend time cuddling.
Some of the house’s many visitors stop by on impulse. Others drive by for years before finding the time or courage to ask just what’s going on there.
Jan Barry, a West Hollywood resident who has her car serviced nearby, had long wondered about the place and stopped in recently.
“I love that this is their house,” she said. “It’s living art.”
Peter Erskine, an artist and neighbor, said he often takes friends by for a look-see.
At first, Erskine said, he was of two minds about the dolphins, giraffes and other shapes that started popping up. But now, he said, “I like it more and more. It’s getting wacky and crazy, but it’s holding together.”
Many empty surfaces remain. Outside walls painted purple and blue seem to cry out for a toy teapot or two, or perhaps a porcelain cat from a great-grandmother’s tchotchke cabinet.
“It’s never too much,” Duran said. “You can’t go ordinary on top of spectacular. You have to keep trying something different.”
As a helper cracked tiles and plates on a recent Saturday afternoon, Duran quickly but carefully took the pieces and laid them in fresh cement along a pathway near a side door.
“Ten more years,” he said, “and we’ll be finished.”
