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Photo Sue Harrison
Gail Browne only works on her miniature houses for a couple of months before Christmas.
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Photo Sue Harrison
Acorns, twigs, beach pebbles and pine cones combine to turn the mundane into the magnificent, like this mini-home. |
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Small & tender visions of home
Browne’s mini-homes evoke holiday spirit
Gail Browne has been making art on the Outer Cape since the mid-’60s and that work includes oils, watercolors, linoleum prints and ceramics. If that’s not enough, she takes a two-month break from those and focuses her attention on crafting miniature houses complete with landscaped yards and dustings of snow.
The houses look like they’ve jumped out of some New York City store Christmas window display, and from now through the end of the year Browne’s collectors, along with everybody else, get a chance to purchase one and take it home to become part of their holiday celebration. (Look for the houses in the window or on the shelves of her Gail Browne Gallery, 364 Commercial St., Provincetown.)
Her paintings and prints center on Cape images — the waterfront, docks or crowded streets — but the houses are something completely different.
“I used to walk in Beech Forest and pick up little pine cones and bits of wood and put them in piles on my porch by the piles of beach glass,” she says. “Then I heard people talking about affordable housing and I thought, hmm, and I started making affordable housing in all styles.”
“People bring me things like designer acorns,” she says, ticking off a list of people who have brought her construction parts for the houses. “David and Jerry, two dentists from Buffalo, show up every spring with a bag of stuff from their yard. And I have a professor who brings me magnolia pods and other gnarly things from the South. They make beautiful landscapes. I get birch bark from someone in Vermont.”
She pulls out a pile of brown cardboard and shows how she begins the houses. First, she decides a style — Cape Cod, chateau, A-frame — and then draws out each side of the house in the cardboard. She cuts out the basic shape and glues it together before adding a roof. With that as a form she starts cutting in doors and windows that she backs with heavy clear plastic. Using a glue gun, she covers the exterior in birch bark or “shingles” made from pieces of large pinecones. The roof is made of acorn caps or “thatch” made of pine needles.
“I follow the same steps you would in building a real house,” she says. She gets her windows in, roof on and siding attached and then the really fun part begins — the trim and decorations. A variety of twigs, driftwood and other found bits make up the decorative side of construction.
“Then Gail the landscaper comes in,” she says. “At the end, I give it a little dusting of snow.”
The houses slowly come to life, each one different, whimsical and charming. Chimneys are made of beach stones. The yards are wonderlands of never-before-seen plants. Pinecones and magnolia pods are mini-trees. Dried poppy pods poke up out of sphagnum moss shrubs and teensy pinecones turn into flowerbeds.
The houses are very labor intensive. A small saltbox takes 20 hours and may sell for $225; a large chateau can take 30 to 40 hours and cost $500. But she’s not complaining.
“It’s all pleasure, none of it is work,” she says. “And there is no angst like with painting where you worry about the public or your own ego.”
It could be fun, she agrees, for families to make a tiny house, maybe ornament-sized as a holiday family project. Take walks to gather material and enjoy making it, she says. Just keep it simple and have fun.
After about a month of intensive house building, Browne says she starts to get burned out and begins to return to her other artwork.
She also goes to Italy a couple of times a year and paints there. She paints in Provincetown the rest of the year. She teaches ceramics in adult ed classes and has been doing a lot of linoleum cut prints.
Browne first came to Provincetown from Cleveland in the ’60s to study with Henry Hensche. In 1970 she moved here year-round. This is the fourth year in her Commercial Street gallery. For two years before that she had a space in Whaler’s Wharf and before that showed in other galleries.
She will be open weekends through the end of the year and possibly extra days the week before Christmas and the week between Christmas and New Year’s.
Holding up a finished house she looks at it and says she likes walking into the gallery in the morning and seeing the houses. It’s a pleasant shock to the eyes. And equally or more fun is walking up and seeing people looking in the window and hearing kids say, “Mommy, mommy look at that.”
Her houses, it turns out, make her as happy as they will their new owners.
“Martha Stewart would be jealous,” she says.
artseditor@provincetownbanner.com
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In the Arts
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Nov 30th, 2006