Cast an eye in any direction of artist Ray Yoshida`s sunny, tidy home and there are collections.
African masks adorn a living room wall, hovering over a thicket of vintage smoking stands, crowded like a miniature cocktail party on one side of the room. Mexican ex votos (votive) paintings festoon a corner of the kitchen. In the pantry, a collection of ceramic mixing bowls, in various sizes and colors, fills the shelves.
”I don`t use them,” admits Yoshida of the bowls. ”I like the forms, the colors, the glazes.”
Yoshida, an artist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is a collector par excellence. More than a dozen collections, gleaned from shopping flea markets and antiques shows since he was an art student 30 years ago, make his modest home a visual wonderland. Indeed, his collections are his decor.
”I don`t know if there ever has been one of anything,” he admits. ”I tell myself, `Stop.` I don`t need it, and then I buy more.”
His example is a siren song to those who have timidly stuffed objects they love into drawers, shoved them into boxes or banished them to the basement. Living with what you love, however humble the objects, can personalize a home and give it warmth.
There are about 50 million U.S. collectors, estimates Howard Fischer, founder of Treasure Chest, a New York-based monthly newspaper for collectors and dealers. And what people are saving is changing.
”It used to be antiques and collectibles, which had to be 30 years old,” Fischman observes. ”But now people are collecting things 5 and 10 years old. They are collecting hubcaps, barbed wire.”
”I think the reason people were into collections in the 1980s is because people had more money and there was a rise in interest in arts and crafts in general,” says Joanna Wissinger, author of the new book ”Lost & Found, Decorating With Unexpected Objects” (Macmillan, $29.95). ”I don`t think that`s going to go away, even in this age of postconsumerism.
”Consumers are more educated today,” she notes, ”and the educated consumers do not want something mass-produced. They want something with value and meaning, and they are increasingly sophisticated about their options.”
That sophistication includes knowing the difference between a
”collection” and just ”stuff.”
”To be a real collection,” Wissinger says, ”it is generally agreed, objects must be acquired according to some overall plan, whether it is that you want to own all objects in the world made by a certain artisan or from a particular material.”
Most collections are one of three types, she says. They are: a motif or theme collection, such as Mickey Mouse, watermelon or lion items; similar objects such as televisions, toys or antique woodworking tools; objects made from the same materials, such as wood, ivory or glass.
Whatever the collection, use it to decorate your home, Wissinger says.
Yoshida does just that. His collections are arrayed against a spare background of white walls, shiny natural-colored floors and only a handful of furniture pieces. With an artist`s eye he carefully arranges objects, covering every wall and most surfaces in a manner reminiscent of a latter-day Victorian. Yoshida avoids the feeling of clutter so prevlant in most Victorian rooms by keeping the collection on or close to the walls, leaving plenty of open space in the centers of the rooms. The openness allows not only breathing room and traffic flow, but appreciation of the assembled objects at some distance-not unlike a small gallery.
Despite the disparity of items and origins, harmony abounds because all of the objects are of rough-hewn and humble materials. Most have been produced by obscure self-trained artists, a genre now dubbed ”outsider art.” Yoshida prefers ”things that have a human touch. I never buy fancy, shiny things like glass and silver.”
In this home, a twig chair cozies up to to a shelf of kachina dolls. A metal figure made entirely of bottle caps is right at home on a carved cabinet near fanciful Mexican masks. There is so much to interest the eye it is easy to overlook the television in the den, unlike most homes.
Because he is single, Yoshida admits he has to make no compromises in his acquisitiveness or his home. The decor nourishes his imagination and, he believes, ignites the imaginations of others.
”Children like it,” says the artist, who dreams of opening a children`s museum in his native Hawaii. ”Sometimes adults walk through untouched, but children are all eyes. I think it is good for them to have so much to see.”
Mapping it out
A collection does not need to be the focal point of an interior, however. It can also be an accent. Arthur Holzheimer`s impressive collection of rare maps is a stunning and subtle complement to his comfortable suburban residence.
Unlike some collections-which must somehow be shoe-horned into a home-Holzheimer bought maps as way of decorating.
”I wanted to collect art, but I couldn`t afford it,” recalls the retired investment executive about his first acquisition 30 years ago.
Intrigued by the vintage maps that graced a colleague`s office, Holzheimer sought out a Michigan Avenue dealer. ”In most cases,” he discovered, ”the maps were cheaper than the nondescript prints I`d been picking up at summer art fairs.”
The maps combined Holzheimer`s interests in art and history, and he first bought solely on personal preference. But after several years, he switched to more sophisticated tactics. He sold his ”stuff” and began serious collecting.
”I`m not going for quantity at all,” says Holzheimer, an active volunteer in the map collections at the Newberry Library and the Chicago Map Society. ”For a collection to be meaningful, it has to be cohesive. I think what you want to see is a progression either in expertise or in style.”
He has concentrated on the period when Christopher Columbus and later explorers were charting the globe. Dozens of beautiful examples of 16th and 17th Century cartography hang framed like paintings throughout the home.
Protected from sunlight with acrylic to retard fading, the maps co-exist nicely with 18th Century-style dark wood furnishings, silver and Wedgwood in the formal dining room and with the wall of shelves and traditional living room furnishings.
Finely drawn, intricately detailed, this collection beckons but never assaults. Massed together on walls in the spacious front entry and in a similar space at the top of the stairs on the second floor, the maps add a gallery feeling in otherwise hard-to-decorate spaces.
”I don`t look closely at (them) each day,” Holzheimer admits. ”But when you dust or pass by, you learn, almost by osmosis.”
Glass action
Drake and Beverly Shepard hope that living with 18 art glass panels will give their two lively little boys, Colton, 5, and Grant, 2 1/2, an
appreciation of beautiful things.
The panels hang in each of the windows of the couple`s Greek Revival cottage.
”It was somewhat of a risk,” admits Drake about the decision to raise two youngsters surrounded by glass. So far, Drake says proudly, ”we`ve had zero accidents.”
The Shepards began collecting more than seven years ago by salvaging panels from alley finds, garage and yard sales. Repairing and restoring such finds provided the couple not only a decorating element, but a shared hobby and hours of fun. It also gave them a starting point for home decoration that they continue to pursue with the addition of vintage furniture and artifacts for a turn-of-the century decor.
The arrival of children increased the couple`s time pressures, however, and Drake says acquisition has slowed. ”We don`t really look for them,” he says. ”We sort of bump into them.”
One panel literally arrived in pieces in a cardboard box delivered by a woman who knew the couple valued such treasures.
The growth of the family, however, has not dampened the couple`s appreciation of what they already own and their determination to enjoy it. Hanging panels decorate every room. There is a ”no-ball playing” rule in the house, and Colton already has learned to help clean a panel with a toothbrush. ”They are art,” says Drake. ”They were meant to live with, not to be put in a cabinet. They were meant to let the light shine through.”
