I often receive compliments for the photography on my blog. Now I’d like to introduce you to the photographer, Steve Werney, whose photos decorate not only my blog, but also the walls in my apartment.

He is a California native, and a contractor by trade. His specialty is recasting functionality and architectural nuance.  His company transformed a meatpacking and smokehouse facility into a restaurant, a fast food restaurant into a cooking school, and an old firehouse into a slick, contemporary living space.

But his other passion is photography, and the visual arts, and like any artist you find out a good deal about him through his work.

He’s always searching for unusual places: the empty factory, the abandoned bunker, the shipyard on a day with few ships.  He gravitates to situations that involve risk or demand some counterintuitive appreciation.  He has no hesitation in jumping over fences or climbing up crumbling battlements.  Nor any hesitation in getting his subject to be provocative.  There’s always an edge in his view of the world.

And, of course, his work is distinguished by its beauty — whether looking at a person, a building, or a car. He has a special eye for cars, for the particular angle that suggests speed or the signature of an unusual design.

I should add that he brings a special feeling to his subjects, whether in a photo or in one of his buildings.  And such is his genius: he has a way of being with people that encourages trust and the knowledge that whatever he’s creating will be the best he can possibly make it.

His photography compliments my blog so well. His passion to articulate light matches my own desire to find the words.

It was originally a Mormon Church, built in the upper Castro district before or after the earthquake of 1906; that’s not quite clear. Then it became a Methodist church. After that, in the early 1990s, it was converted into the city’s first gay and lesbian synagogue, Sha’ar Zahav. But then that community needed a larger space and sold the place to a young couple in 1997. They sold to a Doctor, who passed away and the house was sold to Joe and Rafael, San Francisco realtors, who share a passion for distinguished and unconventional buildings.

The new design is a perfect recast of the space with a sleek contemporary design, but at the same time, honoring the original architectural features, including the high roof, lined with beautiful wood paneling.

The interior decor includes Joe and Rafael’s collections of interesting objects, for instance, a group of old globes, of different sizes and colors, and placed in a compelling way, and as your eye wanders here and there, everything fits into the spirit of the place, literally and figuratively.

In the living room, where the apse used to be, there’s a fireplace. It makes for an interesting play on the relationship between the hopeful magic performed on the altar and the mysterious appeal of fire.  Both call together a community, and both you might argue suggest the fundamental principles of good design, which should enlighten, even provoke, and in some way always transform.

The front of the same room, where the nave used to be, is the dinning area, and again the interpretation is aligned with the original purpose.  After all, this is where the real celebration of life happens.

Altogether, it’s a fantastic merging of life and style, a space reinterpreted, a holy space no less, but recast with good intention. It reminds you that the real substance of a church is not the building or the symbols inside, but the people, themselves, the congregation, however you define that.

“Give a girl the right shoes,” Marilyn Monroe once said, “and she can conquer the world.”

Here is my story about shoes.
When I first came to San Francisco, I arrived on a one-way ticket. My plan was to continue on to Brazil; Rio De Janeiro was on my mind then, which is it’s own story.

Nevertheless I linger in San Francisco, I rent a place on 3rd Street and Stillman, above a bike messenger station, which was the perfect metaphor in my life, because I was looking everywhere for a message to tell me whether I should stay, or go on, or find a way back to Europe.

One day I went window shopping and ended up in a shoe boutique off Union Square. The salesman was a very nice gentleman who asked me in passing about where I was from and other details of my ‘foreign-ness.’ I was more interested in talking about shoes but I politely answered all his questions, and eventually found what I wanted. These are the shoes of my dreams, I thought. Delicate leather straps, soft metallic leather and the most glamorous heels. Beautiful beyond belief.

Out of one ear I heard the salesman joking. “Yes, they are beautiful and about the same price as an airplane ticket to go back home. So now it’s your decision between one or the other. Which will it be?”

I didn’t give it much thought. I put the shoes back in the box, handed them to the gentleman and said, “I’ll take them.”

And that’s how I came to stay in San Francisco. It became my Land of Oz. And my “ruby slippers” had taken me to where I already was….

Bespoke, as a verb, is the past form of bespeak, which is an old-fashioned word, from the British, that means to suggest.  To give evidence of.  But the word is also an adjective that means to make something to the buyer’s specification. To customize.

And so for example, a group of London taylors in Mayfair, known as the Savile Row Bespoke Association, has tried to set standards for the making and selling of apparel to secure a certain trademark.

The standards are basically these : Hand work used almost entirely on all garments, including the “individual cut of a paper pattern” and Personal service, such as qualified advice, a large selection of fabrics, or the keeping of all records for future orders.

Bespoke is also the name of an interesting store up in the Sierra, in Truckee.

And so you come to this little town and here is this little store, which has an ‘old soul’ according to the proprietor,  I am always drawn to that notion of an ‘old soul’.  When you see a child and you say: he or she is an old soul, you want to spend time with that child. And that’s how you feel in this store. You want to find a story behind the objects, in the notebooks, ceramics and clothes, which are all made by hand by an artist or by a small company.

Isn’t there a special pride when you buy an object and you know it was made by hand locally?

You can also find some antiques like an old typewriter that is actually used for typing the labels. And the books that bring you right back to your childhood, all printed in USA or Sweden.

But my attention was focused on some unique plump pillows with a hand-embellished extra stitch. They are a labor of love and a unique work of art, crafted by the store’s owner, Heather River. Heather carefully chooses the fabrics with geometric abstract design.

They remind me of Kazimir Malevich suprematism paintings, like the red crosses on the blue background. To the beautiful abstract design of this organic cotton she adds a clever artistic surprise: an extra stitch to emphasize the shape of the cross. The designs also include abstract lines portraying churches and houses on the top of hills.

That image, along with the store and the town and the river took me right back home.

My questions to Heather:

Who inspires you the most?

I am inspired by a combination of many elements.  From antique stores to small boutiques, blogs to good coffee shops, old barns to rusty tools, inspiration comes to me in many different forms.  What inspires me about other artists is how they can a seemingly ordinary object and surprise me with something simplistically fantastic.

What is your favorite place in Bay Area?

My favorite place to visit in the Bay Area… hum that is hard there are so many. One of my favorite places to visit in the Bay Area is Paxton Gate. I love the way they display everything as though you are sifting through a museum of objects. I also adore eatting at Tacu Baya in Berkeley… the enchiladas are incredible!

What was the last great object that you found or that was given to you?

One of the most amazing things about having my shop is that people really connect with all of the “old” things I have. Often wives are ready to leave before their husbands who find my old tool and typewritter collections facinating to say the least. I have had perfect strangers give me family heirlooms because they know I will cherish and keep them “safe”  in my shop. The last object that was given to me was an amazing old short hand dictionary. A man just walked in to my shop told me he had been in the week prior and realized he had something I would really like. It was a wonderful surprise.

Where would you go if you had to leave right tonight to an unexpected vacation?

A train ride across Europe, stopping at all the small towns and villages, eating delectables, and drinking amazing espresso with my son, Husband, and dachshund Lulu.

The latest fun thing you did?

Sitting on the shore of Lake Tahoe all day for my birthday with friends, fresh fruit, and sandy kids.

On my bookshelves I keep a very dear object, a gold frame with small inlaid photos of lips on each side of the frame. Four different lips, like four different human characters. The frame was a birthday present from an artist friend named Beverly Rayner. Beverly is a mixed media artist, constructing her art pieces around photographic imaginary. She often uses photos of lips and eyes, each telling some mysterious tale.

Yes, of course, eyes are the window to the soul. Such is the aphorism. Scientists insist the secret is in the Iris. Subtle patterns indicate whether you are human or android. Whether you are in your head or in your heart… If you want to know what to make of someone, look at their lips, look at their smile..

Beverly is the consummate storyteller. No object is without a story. Remember what Chekhov said about an ashtray, and so, like a writer, she is always using found objects. She reshapes the purpose of the perfectly mundane, and gives them a different meaning. She is a master of enhancing clutter with significance. She narrates stories of  photographs by altering, reshaping, cutting, tearing them and integrating them with other materials. Her sculptures are assemblage creations always narrating a story out of existing objects, reused in a new context.

I asked her some questions…..

Who inspires you the most?

The human race as a whole is the inspiration for my art – there are endless ideas sparked in my imagination by the oddities of human nature.

What is your favorite place in Bay Area?

I have a lot of favorite spots, but San Francisco is my favorite city.

What was the last great object that you found or that was given to you?

An old, short brass stand with a cross arm. It was lent to me by a colleague in Virginia to use in my recent installation of the Museum of Mesmerism there, and it worked so eerily well in the piece that he very kindly gave it to me.

Where would you go if you had to leave right tonight to a unexpected vacation?

New York. I have been missing it a lot, and this fall there is a show of the Quay Brothers at MOMA that I really want to see.

The latest great show you visited?

Jean Paul Gaultier at the de Young. Phenomenal!

The latest great book you read?

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. A complex weaving of realities with some gorgeous use of language.

Years ago, as an art history student, I used to spend long, languorous summers restoring frescos on the walls of centuries old churches. The sensible touch was all important. You had to be very careful not to tap too hard with your little scalpel, or brush the plaster too vigorously.  The work was all about precision, patience and taking pleasure in revealing and rediscovering…..

Which brings to mind the work of two major American artists, David Ireland and Ann Hamilton and their transformational art at the Headlands Center for the Arts located at Ft. Berry in the Marin headlands. These white painted army barracks, built in 1907, have been changed into an unexpected fine art.

Late conceptual artist David Ireland and his crew stripped  the military architectural structure down to expose historical layers, sandblasted the paint off the stamped-tin ceilings, pillars and walls. Using sandpaper and solvents they picked the paint off the beautiful stairwell, railings, and banisters. They stripped walls down to the original plaster and baseboards to their original wood. They sandblasted through layers and layers of color, stopping at the rich greens and ochres that are now visible.   Ireland’s work reminds me of how age sandblasts through the layers of memory: the most subtle smells from childhood. You travel to the past from one exposed level of paint to another.

I was very fortunate to get to know David Ireland  and to be invited to his home on Capp street while he was still alive. He was tall, with the white hair and he had a look from the past.He told me once that he use to have an African safari store, he looked like he could be safari guide or archeologist. David Ireland was an explorer, treating his home as an archaeological side, always trying to find secret of the past,taking pleasure in revealing and rediscovering…..

It is good to know that his San Francisco home on 500 Capp Street will reopen next year.

If you ask me, what is it about a red dress, I am reluctant to say.  But sometimes I am the embodiment of a red dress.  It’s the door to my other self, to carefree without end, without limits, it represents the sound of crickets in summer, or else walking down a cobblestone street, seeing and waiting to be seen, tempting the air itself. Or else it’s the feeling of “walking on a red carpet” coming into the theater of personal fulfillment, no matter how absurd.  Or else, because I love cars, it conveys the intensity and beauty of a red Ferrari, that particular power of form and substance, the sound of it, the feel of its lines.  The redness of it. Of course it’s all true. What better illusion, what better metaphor. You slip into a red dress and your mood changes instantly and your energy level becomes higher. You are suddenly confident and courageous.  Or a fine copy of that. It also summons the magic mood that something unexpected and beautiful will happen.

In medieval Europe, kings, cardinals, and nobility wore red. In classic Rome, the most powerful men were called the coccinati, meaning the “ones who wear red.”

For artists Marina Abramovic a red dress means energy. Watching The Artist is Present made me think about the color choices of the dresses she was wearing at different times throughout the exhibition in MoMa — which has her sitting in silence across from any number of museum visitors almost every day. For the opening of the exhibition, she chose the bright red dress. Then she wore the meditative, deep blue dress. And then back to red, to gain new energy because of the increasing difficulty of the performance. Last Marina chose to wear a white dress to achieve a calm state for her final month of performing. In red, she was intense, assertive, while in dark blue and in white she seemed reticent, withdrawn.

The ghost towns in California are all but gone.  Here and there you still find remnants in the gold country, a few dusty streets and empty houses, or over the border in Nevada.  And for a moment you can still imagine what it must have been like, and even the romantic notions people must have had about living in such a place, and the promise of the coast in the far distance.

I have been fascinated with this part of San Francisco for years. It is a largely unknown ghost town in the very middle of the city.

You may remember that the city’s origins in the 1850s involved shipbuilding, much of which was centered in this area. It was a happening industrial spot that gradually extended to Dog Patch and parts of Potrero Hill.  And up until 40 years ago, Pier 70 bustled. I stand in the shadows and imagine life in the warehouse, the sound of the machinery and loud conversations. I am standing where thousands of workers clocked in each day and where many of the nation’s battleships were built, christened and launched.
Union Works Machine Shop, which later become Bethlehem Steel, thrived here. Their work force peaked in 1945 at around 25,000 workers.

Fencing, graffiti tagged, and riddled with broken windows, now off limits, vacant, surrounds most of these buildings.
Looking at the architecture that was once so magnificent, the industrial power of the machine age, it all makes me think how this empty place becomes anything your imagination takes you to. For example, the Union Works Power house reminds me of an old-fashioned dance hall with a big crystal chandelier. Such is the nature of haunted places.

But there is another gift here. The front door is a visual gift for admirers of the bohemian street artist, Hugh Leeman. He pained a mural, a portrait of “Benz”. It adds to the artistic value to my ghost town.  Remember also that this was one of the settings used by Alfred Hitchcock for Vertigo.
The Bethlehem Steel Office Building, designed in 1917 by San Francisco architect Fredrick H. Meyer, was used in the opening scene, where James Stewart meets an old friend and Hitchcock in his cameo is one of the passersby.

Yes, ghost town, street art, classic movies, machine-age era architecture and emptiness itself, meet here on Pier 70.

Big table, big white table cloth. Fresh flowers, hand-picked lettuce and tomatoes, along with a crowd of winemakers, photographers, builders, artists, chefs and kids—always lots of kids running around, darting between the persimmon trees and apple trees, and through the herb and vegetable garden that my friend Madeleine tends lovingly.

Madeleine is a graphic designer, originally from the midwest; Thomas, a photographer, moved to California years ago from Germany. They found this farm with the white rustic house, reminiscent of a fairytale book illustration, surrounded by the rolling hills of western Marin. Seven years ago they rebuilt the old barn which now holds a lofty studio that serves as Thomas’ photo atelier or, sometimes, just a place for great parties.

The property became a weekend refuge and also the place where the couple celebrate the seasons. On the Fourth of July, the big table stands in the front of the house, or sometimes next to the herb beds along the back pasture fence. I never know who will be attending, but it’s always an interesting and fun day, sitting under the willow trees, enjoying scenery and the particular light of this little coastal area in Marin County.

On Thanksgiving, the big table sits in the kitchen next to an old wood burning stove. Again, friends gather and enjoy the coziness of the farmhouse, aromas from whatever is bubbling on the stove and watching Madeleine transform flour, butter, fruit and many more ingredients into sweet pies and savory dishes.

Thomas and Madeleine share their love for celebrating seasons, food and nature with their friends and extended family. And what is better part of life than a big table — full of food shared in the midst of stories and opinions and laughter, and if somebody needs compassion, they can get that too….

Photo by Thomas Heinser

I watch my daughter more than she realizes, especially now that she is leaving. I look at her letters and essays from school, and above all, the beauty of her handwriting is what strikes me. That hand  ballet-dancing across the page, each swirl, an artistry. Then you see the completed page and all it needs is a frame.

The notes that she leaves on the kitchen table are remarkable, even something so mundane as a shopping list.  And so the word “sponge”, for example, does not convey utility but rather itself, its own form, an abstract image.  Look at the “s” and what is it but a swan’s neck, with such sensuality, such grace…

And then there are dinner party guest lists, where the friend’s names are celebrated even before they are invited. Along with birthday cards and letters where feelings spill across the page and what have you got?  The profound poignancy of a handwritten letter. It’s the attention to each letter.  Such an old world concern.  And perhaps that’s why I examine it, why I let it enthrall me — because it draws you back, not to another decade but to another century, to some classical sensibility long forgotten when the form of the day wasn’t tied commercial enterprise, but to expression itself, for itself….

Hence the forgotten, and totally romantic experience, of receiving a letter that you can put on a shelf or on a wall or simply in a drawer, where it doesn’t disappear when your computer breaks down or when you push the delete button.

It’s the lost art I appreciate.