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Home Essays [JH] Ed Fella’s Living Room Wall

David Cabianca|Essays

December 31, 2009

[JH] Ed Fella’s Living Room Wall

Desk
My space in Ed Fella’s office, California Institute of the Arts, 2010. Photograph by the author.

In 2010 I had the opportunity to spend a semester teaching at CalArts and Ed Fella invited me to share his office space. It seemed that neither one of us got much done when we were both there because we spent much of the time debating everything from design through philosophy, art and politics. The day was often broken up with a 2pm walk to the student run café for a coffee – and more often that I wish to admit – a donut. We would sit for another hour on the terrace, never missing a beat from a conversation that probably began hours earlier.

My space in Ed’s office consisted of a simple chair and an area of a table that he had cleared for me. Nearly every day (and weekends too), I came in with my laptop and thermos of coffee to get me through the first few hours and I would work on my lecture notes for a course on typography that I was teaching. The wall in front of me was filled with sketches of Ed’s work, drawings by his granddaughter, Polaroids of old work, images clipped from old books, numerous pastels of what Ed calls “drawings for paintings,” and other bits of ephemera that he found interesting. One image in particular that caught my imagination was a severely cropped print of John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark of a 1778. We had seen the painting on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Ed had placed cropped image from it in a plastic sleeve where it hung next to his own work. Copley’s painting is a part of American folklore. It depicts the story of a fourteen-year-old boy who was attacked by a shark off the shores of Havana in 1749, and was ultimately rescued by his shipmates.1 Ed’s treatment of the image — first by cropping a detail and then placing the image in a plastic sleeve — had me thinking about the way that he sees the world.

Copley
John Singleton Copley (1738–1815), Watson and the Shark, 1778, oil on canvas, 72 x 90 1/4″ (182.9 x 229.2 cm). Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

Typically, visitors to an art museum might take full frame pictures of the art (or buy the available postcard in the giftshop). But Ed sees value beyond the artist’s intentions of a unified whole: “Being a graphic designer, I have license to crop images and like doing so to reconfigure them; to take fragments and details to refocus on a part from the whole, which in some cases makes a new or somewhat different ‘whole’ or another point of view or emphasis. I do this a lot in museums where I can take close-up and detail photos of paintings and re-crop them to make new pictures, ‘pictures of pictures’ so-to-speak.”

Ed’s home reflects this same mixture of hi and lo cultures. His house is a small bungalow he shares with his wife, photographer Lucy Bates, and a (almost feral) cat named Otis, found by Lucy on an interstate median during one of their many road trips. It’s a very comfortable home. The backyard is surrounded by a high concrete wall that encloses lush plantings and off to one side, a weathered trellis spans the width of the yard to support a mature grapevine. The weather in Valencia is as one would expect, usually sunny and pleasant, so the backyard serves as an open air living room and with its gas barbeque, it also doubles as an outdoor kitchen.

The living room wall of Ed Fella and Lucy Bates, 2012
The living room wall of Ed Fella and Lucy Bates, 2012. Photograph by Ed Fella.

Their home’s interior contains numerous books of varying topics as one might expect, but they don’t command a central presence in the home. Ed and Lucy chose to cover only one wall with bookshelves in both the living room and their bedroom, and since they live in an earthquake zone, this makes sense. Instead, the living room is dominated by a wall covered with folk or what is otherwise known as “outsider” art. Ed describes the paintings as “thrift store art,” following the title of a book by Jim Shaw of the same name. These framed and unframed pieces reflect his preoccupations. They are paintings and drawings he has accumulated over a lifetime of travelling across America by car. He describes his art collection as reflecting a natural tendency of illustrators and commercial artists to keep scrapbooks of clippings they find interesting for future design inspiration. Not all of the work on the wall is as Ed bought it. A number of pieces have served as grist for his own creativity. “It’s like all found art: 99% of it is bad, but 1% of it gives you that ‘Ooo wow!’” In typical Ed mode, he has sometimes cut up, drawn on top of and reframed the work, essentially making new art. The paintings are mostly landscapes, but one can also find a portrait, a Japanese woodblock, and a photograph.

Ed Fella, scrapbook page, 1960.
Ed Fella, scrapbook page, 1960. Images courtesy Ed Fella.

Ed Fella
Ed Fella, Phoenix Studio ad, 1957. This is the first commercial art assignment Ed did following graduation from Cass Technical High School. On the left is Ed’s first proposal, and on the right, the ad as it was printed: Ed’s first piece of printed commercial art. Images courtesy Ed Fella.

Ed’s handling of the Copley painting — first by reframing and then by hanging it alongside his own work — and the art he chooses to hang in his living room, display more than the interests of a graphic designer. They reflect the regard that a master craftsman has for the labour of others. Ed retired from the advertising industry in 1987 after 30 years of professional experience. Since then, his work has purposely exploited the irregularities, mistakes and just plain uninformed nature of the amateur designer that was once otherwise avoided. His interest in amateur design mixes well with what he calls the “middle brow” or anonymous efforts of most commercial practice. After all, until Ed took up design as an art practice, his advertising work was (and continues to be) relatively unknown. And while Ed’s interests are — for lack of a better word — omnivorous, he is simultaneously discriminating. To the undiscerning eye, a common misconception is that where the vernacular or “unschooled” is concerned, “anything goes.” But in fact the issue of quality is as significant for the amateur as it is for the professional.

1. “Watson and the Shark,” Wikipedia, accessed Dec. 4, 2011