HOMEPLACE
Artist in
Residence: Beatrix Ost’s Virginia Estate
At this
fairy-tale home, magic awaits behind every door
By DANIEL
WALLACE
https://gardenandgun.com/feature/artist-residence-beatrix-osts-virginia-estate/
December
2017/January 2018
Beatrix Ost
has lived many lives. The seventy-seven-year-old Virginia resident’s grand and
evocative paintings and sculptures have been exhibited all over the world, and
she’s also been a screenwriter, a model, and an actress. She’s published
several big, beautiful books; her most recent, The Philosopher’s Style, is a
compendium of her photographs, paintings, bons mots, and stories. She designs
jewelry, and other artists and designers have made her their muse, for years.
But she has become best known for being Beatrix, for how she looks, the clothes
she wears, the way she conducts herself in the world—in other words, her style,
her very way of being. For better or worse, she has become her art, and the
rest of it—her painting, design, sculpture, and writing—orbits her like many
smaller moons.
The first
time I met her was in September. Fall had just arrived, and she was sitting on
a bench outside of Estouteville, the home she’s lived in for the last
thirty-five years, applying a fresh coat of bright red lipstick. She wore a
straw-yellow turban; beneath it I could see wisps of her violet hair. She
draped a dark shawl over her shoulders. Her blouse was ivory lace, and her
skirt, black, reached almost all the way to the grassy drive—her look is often
a cunning combination of both vintage and designer pieces. Pearled and golden
rings decorated her fingers, and she wore a necklace she designed, made from
bomb scrap metal by Laotian artists with an engraving that reads, “In your body
is a good place to be.”
The aphorism
is appended to all of her emails as well.
I drove from
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to Estouteville to see her, and though it’s three
hours away, a half hour or so from Charlottesville, I made it there exactly
when she had asked for me: 3:00 p.m. Neither of us could believe it. “You knew
you were coming to see a very punctual German woman,” she said, and smiled
warmly.
She pointed
to a huge wooden structure that looked like a tree house, but without the tree.
“Shall we talk up there?”
Scattered
all around the estate are homemade pieces like this, made of sticks and vines
and slats of wood found on the property, built by the farmers and gardeners who
take care of the place. Benches, gazebos, little altars. Almost everyone who
works at Estouteville eventually becomes an artist of some kind, which Ost
encourages; but the inclination is also something that might arise naturally
from time spent immersed in the beauty and history of this place.
We made our
way to the top of the structure, brushing away the leggy stems of a wild
rosebush, where we had a gorgeous view of the house. The building of
Estouteville began in 1827, in what you would call Palladian, Roman Revival, or
Jeffersonian style, or perhaps all three. James Dinsmore, Thomas Jefferson’s
master carpenter, who helped him construct Monticello and the University of
Virginia, designed the home. Made of brick, wood, and stucco, Estouteville from
the outside could not be statelier, or more serious, or more awesome. But giant
Tuscan porticoes always have that effect on me.
Ost and I
sat there and talked about various kinds of magic for a while, because magic is
what brought her and her husband, Ludwig Kuttner, here.
“We had a
house on the Hudson, in New York, but it burned down,” she said. “To find a new
home, we held a pendulum above a map of America and let it swing and swing, and
it came to rest on this area of Virginia. Sothe-by’s took us to some other
houses, but when we came here, we knew this was the place.”
After years
creating art and acting in her native Germany, Ost came to New York City with
Kuttner in 1975 “for fun,” she has said, and they loved it so much they moved
there. She was a part of the thriving eighties art explosion but never felt
entirely accepted by the scene: A flamboyant young European woman with the
charming but somewhat aristocratic mien of a dispossessed heiress did not fit
in with the urban edge in vogue in New York at the time. In 1982, they moved to
Estouteville, the seat of her expression ever since.
From our
perch in this treeless tree house, I could see that Beatrix touch: the bronze
sculptures standing on
the lawn,
the marble orbs, and the trunks of dead oaks painted bright green, blue, and
red. “When trees die, we paint them,” she said. “But the one we painted green,
after we painted that one, it came back to life.” She shrugged. Behind us wound
a hedge maze she designed herself.
A small
village of outbuildings also surrounds the main house. The hay barn has been
repurposed as an office; the former slave quarters, a guesthouse. Estouteville
was a stop on the Underground Railroad. When Ost and Kuttner fixed it up, they
found a secret space beneath the house where people on their way to freedom
would hide.
The sun took
an angle on us, and we headed inside. “I’ll make us some tea,” she said, and
left me alone in the Great Hall. I feel certain now that this was her plan,
allowing me a few minutes alone to absorb everything around me, this new world
I’d been welcomed into, which was unlike any I’d been in before. Ost and
Kuttner spent years repairing and refurbishing Estouteville but changed none of
its architecture: Everything there is original to the house, including the
haunting bucrania—a frieze of ox skulls, dozens of them—that line the metope.
But there is no place your eye can rest without seeing something astonishing,
beautiful, or engaging, much of the astonishment created by Ost herself.
Surrealistic paintings, heads made of wax, fiber sculptures, a collection of
pewter, wooden hands. Everything in it could be in a museum, but being there
doesn’t feel like being in a museum: It feels like I’ve walked into the dream
of someone dreaming about a museum.
She brought
back some tea, and we sat in the Great Hall and talked about Estouteville,
where she has lived for almost half of her life. She loves this house, the
history of it and the myth of their arrival. And she’s drawn to its symmetries:
The rooms off the Great Hall are identical in size but filled with different
and wondrous objets, glass owls and crystal balls, gifts from friends, from
other artists, mementos from a peripatetic life—a vast, exotic, and haphazard
collection.
“The rooms
are like a Rorschach test,” she said. But the charm also lies in how the house
flows from the inside out, the outside in, with porticoes in the back and the
front, one for watching the sun rise, the other for watching it set. The pool,
one of the many improvements she and Kuttner brought to the estate, looks like
a giant’s teardrop, and she uses it almost every day. She told me she always
has a deep sense of wonder and surprise at being where she is, in this house,
surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of Virginia acres. “It is a gift to me.”
Architecture,
art, and magic. What else is there? Numbers. We talked about numbers, too. The
number seven is an important one, because things seem to happen to her in
sevens. She had a vision of her seven-year-old self recently, and the girl
said, “Remember when you were seven? You knew everything.” She found love for
the first time at fourteen. It goes on like that for her. This year—2017—she’s
seventy-seven, so it was bound to be, if not a good year, at least an important
one, an interesting one. She even found a pied-à-terre in Charlottesville she’s
begun fixing up, for when she doesn’t want to come back to the too-quiet
country after a night on the town. She is a vital woman, and, who knows,
possibly immortal. “I feel like I’m entering the next third of my life,” she
said.
And then
there’s this: “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the
past.”
She could
have said that, but she didn’t: Thomas Jefferson did. He would have loved her.
No comments:
Post a Comment