Riley & Icehouse

This evening we’ll glance briefly, obliquely on art, memory, nostalgia, sentimentality, visual narrative, and letting go. First, I’d like to praise artist Annette Gurdo (www.annettegurdo.com) for this beautifully rendered, personally poignant portrait or the Riley in front of Rosslyn’s barns. Thank you, Annie!

I will return to the artist and her art soon, but for today let’s drift into the mingling of art and artifacts…

And I’ll offer a notion for your consideration, what I call a kismet collage of images and ideas, inevitably if imperfectly coalescing. A still germinal, perennially protean mosaic gathered from art and artifacts starting with a hint of old car context.

Returning to the topic of a beautiful vintage British motorcar… [a] 1949 Riley RM [that] has been part of my family for more than four decades. Lots of nostalgia and sentimentality hiding behind that seductive exterior! But lamentably she’s spent far too many years under cover, alone, collecting dust,… (Source: Riley Redux?)

In that previous post I asked if it’s time for a Riley redux, and today I assure you that it is. In fact, I submit this quixotic menagerie — the Riley alongside Rosslyn’s carriage barn and icehouse — as an introduction to this family heirloom’s next chapter.

The photograph below, snapped from the icehouse loft, looking north toward the midflight landing, captures the intimacy with which I consider this Ms. Gurdo’s painting multiple times each day as my peripatetic habits dictate. Close encounters with art and artifacts.

Let’s take a few more steps from this midflight landing back to a previous post in which the Riley surfaced symbolically as a sort of time machine.

We live amidst history. Ancient history and recent history. Forgotten history. History happening anew, now. And now. Layers of Rosslyn’s past, present, and future intermingle. Sometimes they resolve themselves. Sometimes they coalesce. A kaleidoscopic collage emerges, vanishes, re-emerges transformed. Again. Timeless. A thousand iterations. More. A mercurial montage. Sequencing. Re-sequencing. 

I invite you to join me at the boathouse for a midwinter mallard jacuzzi or a midsummer double rainbow. Maybe slip into the Riley for a nostalgic cruise. Backward in time. Forward in mind, interweaving our collective imagination. Windows down, wind in our hair, wandering Essex byways. 19th century and 21st century, hand-in-hand. Yesteryear or yesterday.

(Source: Yesteryear or Yesterday?)

Layers of history intermingling, sequencing, re-sequencing. Ms. Gurdo’s painting appropriately, I think, at once marries (and reinvents) Riley and Rosslyn artistically, transforming the artifacts themselves into portable facsimiles as vested with memory, mystery, and enduring relevance as their antecedents. Art is potent!

Memorializing and metamorphosing these subjects is no mere folly. A handsome picture. Yes. A souvenir. Yes. An intimately personal portrait. Yes. But also something more. A durable if romantic bridge that is helping me cross over a chasm, more forward from where I’ve been stuck.

While I do have a bit of an obsession with the various narratives and artifacts left behind by those who have come before us, I’m not obsessed with history per se. I love the details. The stories. The patina. The aged and neglected and forgotten detritus of life lived…

But there is another romantic element at work here as well. I could not have told you the make or model of the car in the photograph, and, frankly, I’m taking it on good faith that the person who listed this auction item titled it incorrectly. But the visual of a 1946 Buick Special Eight inevitably overlaps in my romantic imagination with our 1949 Riley RMB (photos below). I’ve mentioned this handsome automobile in the past, and it’s recently been front of mind again as I evaluate whether or not I should be matching it up with a new owner more passionately committed to its restoration and maintenance.

(Source: Essex Cottage & 1946 Buick)

This last year (plus!) I’ve been questioning, courting and catalyzing transformation, questing for permission, endeavoring to leap and untether and undock… I’ve been evaluating — Susan and I have both been evaluating — whether or not it’s time for transition, BIG transition. For the Riley. For Rosslyn. For us.

And this magical marriage of Riley and Rosslyn outbuildings now adorning place of honor at the heart of the icehouse — itself a timeless, adaptive reuse blurring past and present, art and artifact — is an important piece in the puzzle.

Thank you, Annie.