For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the world. If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty. ~ Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
The house and the face: the two subjects first drawn by almost every child. The house with its window-eyes and door-mouth, the face with its eye-windows and mouth-door, the house with its occasional plume of smoke curling around like a tendril of hair. The portrait of house and of face are the two things we care about all our lives: people (family, friends) and a place of shelter.
Like the face, the house obeys the laws of time: it comes into being, it ages, and all too often, it ceases to exist. This is especially true in America, where wrinkles occupy retirement institutions (strange how we call them homes) and sagging soffits and porches are often signs of the teardown so common in well-heeled cities today.
Emily Rapport’s recent work approaches the house as a subject of portraiture. In her paintings she addresses the role of the house as a humanizing factor in our life (it is where we live, love, argue, play, work, and age) and as a construct of community (houses on any given block are superficially different from each other, and yet form neighborhoods where residents feel a certain belonging and pride). She also portrays, without flinching, the changes in these same neighborhoods: the gutting, teardown, and rebuilding of houses, a process that often means displacement for those at the bottom or in the basement of society.
I am looking at The Yellow House, Brown Trim (top image). There is a house, a car, a Chicago-style garage that gives out to the alley (Note to New York City! This is where Chicago puts its trash! Not on the sidewalk!), vegetation, and a scrawny chain link fence. Look closer: there is a basketball hoop, a wire coming out of the side of the house, jutting out as if intent on escaping, like so many wires hastily added to older homes for internet and cable, and a faded small sign meant to discourage burglars. The windows reflect back out onto the neighborhood: there is the reflection of a tree on city property, the iconic yellow maple that grows in a gangly sort of way, much like the teenagers who perhaps shot baskets there this afternoon, last year, or ten years ago. Then there is the house next door: their porch seems pristine. Do the owners wish their neighbors would put on a better face?
Without seeing the inside, we sense that this is not just a house; it is a home. Children were raised here, parents have grown older, grandparents have visited, a dog or car has colonized the backyard, t.v. has been watched, illicit phone calls made, perhaps even an unsupervised party or two. This house has been the protective shell for those within it. As Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space, “…the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” The shelter of the house gives us the space to dream, to muse, and to do our homework. For those who struggle with rent or finding shelter, the dreams are all too often suppressed.
Johannes Vermeer, The Little Street (Het Straatje), 1657-58
The house has long been a familiar subject in painting. Vermeer’s The Little Street depicts a brick house on Vlamingstraat that scholars believe to have been the home of Vermeer’s aunt, who owned a business selling tripe. It is a solid house and solidly working class: the brick window headers are modest, paint is chipping away here and there, and the colors of the repainted window frames vary, which suggests that whatever paint was at hand had been used for touch-ups. Children play, a small grey cat looks for a stray piece of raw gut next to the passage that was called Tripe Gate, a woman works on something in her lap (embroidery, maybe lace?). The whole scene speaks to being at home, and being there solidly and with confidence during the Dutch Golden Age.
More recently there are the houses of David Hockney and Edward Hopper. Hockney focuses on the abodes of wealthy Californians and their outdoor swimming pools, the painterly flatness referring to the dry Southern California weather and the relative flatness of experience, the lack of struggle that most of these people (many of them his benefactors) had in their life. Hopper’s houses, though often painted in isolation, make an interesting pairing with the houses in this exposition. Hopper’s houses, like Rapport’s, use architectural details (porches, balconies, posts, box windows, cornices, and siding, to mention just a few) as so many facial details (make-up, piercings, moustaches, moles, sallowness, ruddiness, noses, fixed or not) that customize both the house and the face. These are details that are universal and immediately recognized and yet have limitless variations as they decorate, beautify, and render unique. Look at Rapport’s Duo-Tone House, which is actually a three-tone house thanks to the beautifully rendered turquoise tree shadow fingering across the olive facade. What architectural fantasy, some would say emboldened madness, prompted its owners over the years to build a large box-like extension that juts out and covers up the classic A-frame? Like a botched face-lift, the original forehead peeks out from behind this large, unbalanced add-on that happened, one must imagine, because of a growing family and a wallet not fat enough to hire an architect. The mismatched blue and green siding remind us that making do with what is on hand has not changed much since Vermeer’s tripe house in Amsterdam: practical decisions in practical neighborhoods, before the contagion of discarding and tearing down, often known as development.
Emily Rapport, Duo-tone House, oil on canvas, 30″ x 40,
This brings us to another human concern in Rapport’s current work: the transient nature of the American urban home. Rapport works in Ravenswood, Chicago, a neighborhood that has been affected by the teardown trend in the city of big shoulders. Teardowns tend to replace affordable housing with expensive condominiums or large, very pricey homes, driving up real estate prices and pushing out working-class families and renters. The environment loses out too: a substantial percentage of all landfill in the United States is construction and demolition waste. When she records changes in neighborhood housing, Rapport often chooses to focus on the gentler urban idea of renovation. If tearing down can be read as an end, then rehabilitation is what we do after a set-back: we try to combat what ails us, to turn around the relentless march of time. This is no less true with houses. Too small? It can be enlarged. Leaky roof? It can be replaced. Seventies kitchen in avocado or harvest gold? It can be transformed. In a series of four paintings, Rapport takes on the rehab of a house on Wolcott. Again, as in many of Hopper’s houses, there is so much detail that the viewer is invited to look closely and patiently.
Emily Rapport, Summer’s End, oil on canvas, 24″ x 36,
I want to focus on the first and third in the series, both painted at dusk, a time of day that Rapport particularly excels at. In the first, Summer’s End, a small A-frame, rather dwarfed on one side by a much larger house and on the other by a brick two-flat, is portrayed in a dilapidated state: much of the siding has fallen off, exposing the wood of the frame. Rapport’s use of burnt umber, chestnut, and black conjures the sensation of wetness and the smell of mildew. Anyone who has lived through a renovation and has seen and smelled old wood lath knows exactly what I am describing. The porch is falling apart, the yard is overgrown and littered with parts of itself, like an old person who has inadvertently soiled himself, and my favorite detail: two perfectly functional chairs in the midst of all this disarray. And the coke cans, like barnacles on a ship, cling to the chairs as a reminder that life still exists in this yard, despite all the other signs that say otherwise.
Emily Rapport, Raising the Roof, oil on canvas, 24″ x 36,
In the third of the series, we see the same house in a state of transformation, partially wrapped in Tyvek, that ubiquitous subdermal layer under most rehabs or new constructions. Gone are the vestiges of disrepair: this is a zone of activity and of becoming. Piles of two by fours are strewn around the wet yard, two large trash bins sit on the left side, and the roof rises hopefully into the dark blue summer sky. To the right of the house-in-progress is the same two-flat that in the first painting seems to be giving the A-frame a hug of encouragement. Here it is the main source of light, glowing and illuminating the whole composition with yellows, oranges, and reds coming from the uncovered bulbs on the porch, and casting a beautiful, perfectly still shadow of itself into the puddle of muddy water. It is an urban, secular glow, not one of whispers but of shouts, not of immortality and grandeur but of the here and now, of baseball games, transistors, children yelling, dogs barking, crickets, and neighbors talking in the warm summer night.
Rapport’s artistry is in finding the beauty in these scenes, in the average, mundane moments all of us live. She suggests that our gaze, when finely tuned and alert to our own streets, can bring us wonder and beauty while we walk past a two-toned house, a Walgreens pharmacy, or a construction site. To borrow from Nelson Algren (whose house on Wabansia was torn down to make way for the Kennedy Expressway), these paintings are “like loving a woman with a broken nose. You may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”
Top image: Emily Rapport, Yellow House, Brown Trim, oil on canvas, 30″ x 40,
About
Emily Rapport studied painting at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York (94-95), and received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005. Emily’s work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Amsterdam. She lives and works in Chicago.
Vicki Schneider is a Chicago-based writer and French teacher. She writes both serious articles (but not too serious) and humorous essays (but not too humorous). She’s from the Midwest, so she does not like to get carried away.
