News and Press
Old House Interiors
Profile
May 2004
Slowly but surely, C.J. HURLEY'S Symbolist Aesthetic environment is taking over his entire 1913 Arts and Crafts home in Portland, Oregon. Freehand stencils in the bedroom are a perfect counterpoint for an Art Nouveau wallpaper for which no frieze border exists. Arthurian-themed, tapestry-like gesso panels in various media hang in arched, Tudor Revival niches in the living room. Even the watercolors hanging on the walls are hand-painted Hurley originals. Trained in fine art, Hurley is clearly channeling the spirit of Margaret Macdonald, Charles Rennie Mackintosh's less-famous wife, in his Arthurian gesso panels. Where Macdonald tube-lined designs on her panels by squeezing gesso (a sort of plaster slurry) out of a pastry tube, Hurley creates similar effects with twine. Other elements of the panel are created in paint, glass, ceramics, and hand-hammered metalwork. "Like Charles and like Margaret, I want the raised line to integrate the entire design sensibility of the interior space, so I get the same wispy, free-flowing lines that I would get when stenciling a wall or leading a glass window," he says. Custom panels…(are) a relative bargain considering the time involved in creating these one-of-a-kind works of art. C.J. can create a total environment in your home, too.