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Oregonian Home and Garden Big Feature
Frieze frame: Artist's handcrafting echoes century-old styles
by Ruth Mullen (Printed 10/09/03 in the Oregonian)
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That's when his favorite artists and architects flourished, merging their myriad talents to create a synergy of style that would dominate American popular taste in the early part of the 20th century.
For Hurley, that era is still very much alive and well, and no more so than in his own rambling Laurelhurst Foursquare. Over the past two years, the Portland artist has gradually transformed his home into a period blend of early-20th-century art and decor.
There are Art Nouveau lamps, Art Deco fixtures and a handsome mix of Arts and Crafts and Victorian-era furniture collected during years of scavenging. There are hand-painted friezes and watercolors evocative of the early 20th century's organic, stylized forms. There's even a stunning series of intricate gesso panels, a mixed-media art form made famous by Charles Rennie Mackintosh's wife, artist Margaret MacDonald.
But here's the catch: Hurley, 36, is no well-heeled collector. He does it all himself, from the period-style lace curtains in the living room to the hand-painted dining room table and elaborate friezes he plans for every room in the house.
What's more, much of the framed artwork in his home bears his signature, from the gesso panels that took months to complete to the ink-and-watercolor pieces done in the Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts styles. Many of his paintings are done on commission, as are his frieze designs and gesso panels.
"I like the fact that he's inspired by different decorative movements, but he really does his own thing, too," says Kent Mathews, a local real estate agent and art collector. "He's not a copier. He's doesn't reproduce things."
Jo Carter bought an ink-and-watercolor painting from Hurley that is displayed on her dining room buffet. The original Glasgow School design of a stylized tulip, framed in quartersawn white oak, is a perfect fit for Carter's 1907 Craftsman in Sellwood.
"As soon as we redo the dining room, we're definitely getting C.J. to do a frieze for us," Carter says. "It adds so much character to your house, and adding character back into our house is very important to us."
However eclectic, Hurley's penchant for mixing and matching early-20th-century styles (with a few midcentury-modern pieces thrown in) seems a natural fit for a Craftsman Foursquare. He and his wife, Barbara Pierce, snapped up the home in a bidding war soon after moving to Portland two years ago.
"He's always studying, always working, always learning new things," says Pierce, 35. "And the more he learns, the more he puts his own personal spin on it."
That's because Hurley brings an artist's eye and a historian's perspective to architecture and interior design, just like the artists/architects of the early 20th century he so admires: Mackintosh, Victor Horta, the Greene brothers, Josef Hoffman and Frank Lloyd Wright, among others. "There really wasn't a purity of style on the working man's level," Hurley says. "They mixed it up - you bought what you saw and liked. It's kind of a fib on the part of the Arts and Crafts revival to stress the purity of interiors."
A fine arts major at Guilford College in North Carolina, Hurley says his never-ending research helps fuel his creativity. For him, the marriage between art and architecture really began when he and Pierce bought their first house: a charming 1921 row house in Virginia. Next came an 1853 frontier cabin in Kentucky, followed by an elegant Queen Anne Victorian in New Hampshire, and, finally, the Laurelhurst Craftsman that has become a personal portfolio of sorts.
"Within these movements, the whole idea was to blur the line between the fine arts and the decorative arts," Hurley says. "What we've lost today is that individual person like Mackintosh going in and designing everything down to the silverware."
But Hurley is just such a guy. He's a firm believer in that basic Arts and Crafts tenet: Everything must be done "by the hand." When it comes to his decorative friezes, he has no use for plastic stencils or reproduction-wallpaper friezes. Nor does he employ computers as a design tool. He does the real thing, freehand, using an adapted medieval painting technique employed by another hero, German Renaissance painter Albrecht Drer.
After all, these early-20th-century art movements began in the 1850s in Europe as a reaction to Victorian excess and the rise of the Industrial Age. What's more, each of Hurley's frieze designs is original and often stays that way.
"I don't want to repeat motifs," Hurley says. "If people want to repeat motifs, they can buy a ready-made stencil."
That's true for the friezework in his own home. A stylized iris motif in the master bedroom complements period-reproduction wallpaper from an old Arts and Crafts hotel in Sweden, along with the couple's Art Deco bedroom furniture.
"I had to do what was right for the house and the period," Hurley says. "Anything that's been handed down, we want to keep in the family."