Cottage as her canvas: Inside the Venice home of artist Lynn Hanson
Venice artist Lynn Hanson is deep in thought sitting in her light-filled studio, a former carport at the back of her 1921 clapboard cottage. Paintings of swimmers and seascapes, octopuses, crows and rattlesnakes surround her; a bleached pelican skeleton sits on her desk. They are all part of her natural world — the thread that weaves through her art and her vision of modern cottage living, a melange of traditional floral flourishes and other feminine touches along with flea-market, garage-sale and alley finds.
Think pretty but not precious. Think bright and breezy, but with beautiful hints of melancholy.
“I never decorate. The house just evolves,” Hanson says. “Paintings get hung in whatever spot I can find. Sticks and stones get dragged in from my walks. Friends leave fallen nests on my porch that find their way inside.”
Hanson bought her 762-square-foot bungalow in the early 1980s with her former husband Oak O’Connor. She recalls her first impression: “a dumpy cottage with a bullet hole through the front window” and a motorcycle parked on the lawn.
They began by painting the exterior a chalky hue, then added a proverbial white picket fence. Inside, they took down the wall between the living room and kitchen, with its saloon-style swinging doors, to enlarge the itsy space. Removing the blue and green shag carpeting revealed a nice hardwood floor. White-washing cabinets and adding a galvanized metal countertop and a nifty 1940 Gaffers & Sattler stove transformed the small kitchen. Later, an old weathered staircase she purchased for $10 at a yard sale provided a divider between the rooms. It has become a frequent staging area for holiday memorabilia — as well as the favorite spot of her daughter’s silver tabby, Willow, who likes to perch on the top step.
A 1940s dining table covered with a vintage tablecloth stands in the kitchen alongside a corner cabinet, both Santa Monica flea market treasures. A yard-sale toy box serves as coffee table. Nearby, an old player piano she found in the Recycler classifieds acts as another landing spot for her array of natural treasures, all deposited in her “drag and drop” decorating style.
“Old furnishings have character due to their past lives,” the artist says. “I like the idea that another family once gathered at my table and that the toy box once held a child’s things.”
Hanson grew up in Worthington, Minn., where her grandparents made caskets and owned the town’s funeral parlor, perhaps a partial explanation for her predilection for furnishings with soul. She vividly recalls a big house with white pillars and a circular drive, as well as the descent down the stairs, past the organ to the embalming area and casket showroom.
“I can still remember the smell of the embalming fluid and the sadness and beauty of it all,” says the artist, who to this day can find aesthetical beauty in dead things.
Today, her collections of bleached skeletons, sand dollars and sea urchins, nests and butterflies under glass, as well as other vessels of life once lived, are stationed throughout the house, turning the entire cottage into a cabinet of curiosities.
“There’s always something new to excite your senses,” says Lisa Moeschler, next-door neighbor and friend of more than 30 years. A fellow collector, Moeschler found two of the artist’s most prized possessions: a giant crow’s nest that now sits atop Hanson’s living room mantel and an old Venice rowboat that the artist uses as a focal point for the backyard garden.
“I am first of all a naturalist, albeit without any formal training,” Hanson says. “My curiosity has never waned. I’m still the 10-year-old girl who brought home salamanders and toads, garter snakes and birds with broken wings.” On a recent trip to her parents’ Minnesota home, she acquired a red-tailed hawk wing and a bottle-green dragonfly.
It’s not so much that Hanson is interested in dead creatures. She prefers them alive. But finding their bodies gives her an opportunity to study them in a way that photographs do not come close to, she says.
Santa Monica gallery owner Lora Schlesinger, who featured Hanson’s work in the solo show “Prone to Wander” a year ago, says Hanson’s art is “inextricably bound to nature. Her home, a living collage.”
In the last two years, Hanson’s realistic drawings and stark seascapes have been in shows at the Santa Monica and Long Beach museums of art, as well as the Samuel Freeman and Rumba galleries in Santa Monica. A solo summer show at Pyo Gallery in downtown L.A., “Plow the Deep,” opened in Seoul in October. Recently, she received an invitation by artist Ed Ruscha to produce a pair of her drawings as lithographs for Hamilton Press, while an upcoming group show at the Lora Schlesinger Gallery in December will feature her drawings and paintings.
But when Hanson is not working on her myriad projects, she often can be found in her garden — a profusion of dahlias, delphiniums, larkspur and lilies. The fragrant plantings are her personal laboratory for observing flowers and the creatures that frequent them.
“All my work is very site specific,” Hanson says. “I’m interested in what’s right here in my own backyard, or in the alley behind my house, or in the tide pool down by the beach. I’m constantly looking for fallen nests or an old cast off piece of furniture. There’s a poignancy there that shows us the preciousness and fragility of life. It’s all beautiful to me.”