What does Lynne Bailey think of Minimalism? “I think less is less,” she says, putting her spin on architect Mies van der Rohe’s dictum for the Modern Age.
Even so, she takes a humorously self-deprecating view of her hunting and gathering habits. “This is bad. You know you’ve been buying too much on eBay when a newspaper calls you,” she jokes.
Word had gotten around in the collecting community that since Bailey bought her purple iMac last November, she’s bought more than 100 pieces, most of it snow domes, sock monkeys, Florsheim shoe and Wrigley gum advertising and World’s Fair (1893) and Century of Progress (1933) memorabilia. She also has sold six items, also on eBay, and regularly visits amazon.com and bibliofind.com.
Her recent buys have been absorbed into what would be an Aladdin’s cave of treasures to collectors of her rank, and the lowest ring of hell to a feng-shui devotee. This is definitely not a clutter-free zone.
Every available surface of her 1,500-foot-square West Loop loft is covered with stuff. They range from a large ship model made of matchsticks to serious etchings by Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick and antique photographs. A few highlights along the way are a Virgin of Guadalupe collection, a Great Lakes Indian basket collection, Southern ceramic face jugs, a chair made of iron horseshoes, and a zoo of carved-wood folk animals.
One major focus is her collection of prison art and crafts–including “paintings” made with unraveled socks and underwear by Ray Materson, purses, boxes and baskets made of potato-chip bags by Ernest Darnell, boxes made of matchsticks, 6-inch-high motorcycles and 2-inch period chairs carved out of Ivory soap, large picture frames made of rolled colored paper and magazine pages among other things.
A visitor, a veteran viewer of collector excess, is spellbound, not so much by the quantity but by the absolute freshness and originality of it all. Not a cliche in sight.
Along a windowsill are her “space things,” including a flotilla of small flying saucers, a R2D2-sized metallic robot, and paintings of whirling galaxies, myriad Milky Ways and Buck Rogers spaceships by Ionel Talpazan, a New York street person. On the floor are funky trunks and boxes covered in license plates. Along a window ledge, birdhouses for bohemian avians by folk artists.
On the counters of the little galley kitchen Bailey has grouped plastic Mr. Peanut and Col. Sanders figurines, Big Boy banks from every year the banks were made, Flintstone and Popeye push puppets, and racks of salt and pepper shakers with faces.
Using the bathroom can be disconcerting, with hundreds of tiny eyes of Yo Yo or Jingle Bell Jack clowns covering the walls like a three-dimensional wallpaper, watching.
But it’s the massive wooden support beam in the center of the loft that dominates. A colony of sock monkeys hangs up and down all four sides. Standing next to the “tree” of fabric primates is the largest sock money of all, a life-size costume of one found in a Belmont Avenue antiques shop.
Perhaps the way to start is ask if there is anything she doesn’t collect? “I don’t have Beanie Babies,” she replies.
Has she ever counted what she has? No, she says, not even the sock monkeys. “That would be too obsessive. I have too many different interests. I like to look closely at things.”
Any common criteria among all this stuff? “I like things that make you smile. I like the form of a lot of things, like the fossils over there, which I love, and the molas (colorful pieced and appliqued fabric collages) by Cuna Indians.”
Could it be genetic? “It is not. My mom, the last time she was here, she sat on this couch and cried,” says Bailey. With typical humor, she asked her tearful mother, “Do I need an intervention?”
Perhaps it was environment, then. Bailey was raised in Dearborn, Mich., “in a 1960s Modern house, filled with Knoll and Saarinen furniture. No books, nothing, stripped down,” she says. “They didn’t keep any of my kids’ toys. So I replaced them all,” she adds in a tone of gentle triumph.
Never say you’re sorry
Asked how she manages to live with so much stuff, Bailey says clutter doesn’t bother her. “Not at all. I like the quote I have on my refrigerator, `The artistic mind needs to be aesthetically stimulated.’ So I never apologize for the things in my house.”
Fat sable blush brushes, wielded by her part-time household help, are wonderful for keeping the objects dust-free. She has no hard-and-fast rule of thumb for displaying her collections either, other than her really good art is hung in the hallway, out of the sunlight.
Her friends, former Chicagoans Robert Parker and Orren Jordan, who have since moved to Santa Fe, also helped her decorate.
“Our theory was to group like things together,” says Parker, such as the matchstick crosses, the tiny totem poles, the space stuff, “versus spreading them out to make more of an impression.
“Lynne has a passion for a lot of things,” he adds. “It gets her in trouble sometimes, because she can’t stop.”
First there were fossils
“This should be a warning,” says Bailey, “to parents whose kids collect fossils”–which is how she began. That and comic books, which she rented to her friends. Her first serious collection was 1850s daguerreotypes–the first photographs made, before tintypes–which she found in antiques stores. Her parents had a summer cottage in Ontario, and, at age 18, she collected baskets at the Indian reservation on Walpole Island.
While in art school–the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, where she studied photography–she worked in a lab where she learned to do dye transfers, a method of reproducing photos by hand that has now been replaced by computers.
After a divorce, Bailey came to Chicago to work at K & S Photo, a big commercial lab, for 11 years as a sales rep making six figures.
Life was good, a whirl of acquisition, even if the price was being what she describes as “an around-the-clock workaholic.”
Then three years ago, the day after returning from a buying trip to a New York art show, Bailey, now 45, suffered an aneurysm of the heart and then a stroke.
After some time in rehab, she went on disability and was able to work only a few hours a day–on projects such as helping to curate the exhibit, “Kaufmann & Fabry’s Historic Chicago Photos: 1906 to 1933,” which showed at Gallery 312.
She says she was absent from the collecting scene for only one year. During that time, a friend joked, antiques shops from Indiana to Michigan put signs in their windows that said, “Get well soon, Lynne Bailey.”
`Art from the inside’
Among the many ways her life has changed, an unexpected one is that her collecting, once an amusement, is also a lifeline, a way of making a living.
Before the end of the year, she says, she will have her own Web site on the Internet, called “art from the inside,” from which she will be able to sell some of the prison art she has amassed without having to lug it to shows.
When she got her computer, the first thing Bailey, a confessed technophobe, learned to do was get on the Internet to access eBay, says the friend, Robert Parker, who helped set it up. Having access to the Internet, while a temptation, has been a blessing. “With her prison art, the computer allows her to keep that distance but have an outlet to sell,” adds Parker.
She hopes to bank on her skills of serendipity. “I think I could find anybody anything,” she says cheerfully. “One of my clients wanted some voodoo dolls. I said, I have souvenir versus real versus New Orleans and the type done in prison.”
The trickiest thing about trying to support herself off her collections, Bailey says, is “if I like it, I’ll keep it.
“Right now I know I should turn it on because there’s a couple of things I’ve bid on,” she says with a sidelong glance at the computer. “It always says you won so and so. I tell myself, `Lynne, stop saying you won. You bought.”
But somehow the idea that she has won still seems accurate.
