We were going along happily in the place on College Avenue.  A local real estate agent, Frank X. Flood (who had been the selling agent when we bought College Avenue), approached us about a year after we had returned from Maxwell—not long after I had finished my MA and had the Elevator Operator/Registrar job at the Oakland Art Gallery—and said that he had a client who would like to buy our place.  Our response was that how could we move, no place would be big enough to accommodate us and our studio needs, etc.  Shortly after that, he brought us to see a house—3830 Harrison Street—in Oakland.  It was as he suggested, large enough.  We toured the house…

The front lawn was dead weeds only.  The large front porch was full of broken furniture.  As we entered the house, there were stairs covered by a very worn out and holey carpet leading directly ahead of us to the upper floors.  On the left of the stairs was a waiting room with a columned entrance, on the right of the stairs was a living room behind sliding doors with bad scratches and a hasp for a padlock.  The waiting room might have been meant for a place to play the piano, or just simply as a place for people to sit while waiting to be received by the owners of the house.  The living room was entirely paneled in what we later learned was “flame cut” redwood, a deep, dark red with “flames” of lighter red streaking though it and catching the light.  It had been varnished once but now was like an old piano left long in the sun.  There was an arched brick fireplace; the bricks had been painted red, the grout white.

The dining room was behind the living room and a lot bigger—we put Jean’s family’s 13 x 18 foot oriental rug there in later years, it fit with plenty of room to spare.  The walls were paneled with redwood again, but this time not the flame cut. The ceiling was beamed, and heat was to come from a gas fire place with a metal front painted dingy gold.  The fire place did not work. The dining room windows had a view of the back yard with a nearly dead fruit tree and an old shed that had been a chicken coop. 

The dining room led to a pantry converted to another eating room.  There were a shabby table and chairs and an old hunched over man sitting there.  Beyond the pantry was the kitchen with cracked linoleum, an old stove with it seemed must be a hundred years of grease behind and above it.  There was a disheveled middle aged woman doing something in the kitchen.  The kitchen and pantry were painted yellowish-whitish with streaks of grease and finger marks.

The kitchen led to a room in the back of the house and to stairs down to the back yard.  The room at the back had perhaps been meant for a cook—there were two servants’ rooms on the third floor.  When we toured the house, however, the back room was being used as a dog house.  The plaster on most of the walls was cracked and falling.

In the other direction, the kitchen led to a wet bar tucked beneath the stairs to the upper floors, and then to yet another, smaller dining room and then back to the waiting/music room at the front.  Wherever we looked, anything that could be broken was, and the trash of the breaking was still lying on the floor.

We went up the stairs to the second floor.  There were three bedrooms, a sewing room, a large (the size of the very large dining room below it) glassed-in sun porch with a kitchen sink in one corner, a toilet in a closet—I guess “water closet,” there was the tank way up by the ceiling and a broken chain to pull—and a tub and washbasin in a small room next to it..  One bedroom was the size of the living room downstairs and was evidently the master bedroom.  It had a gas fire place that did not work just like the one in the dining room, and an alcove with a small kitchen sink in it.  There had been a lot of leakage in the sewing room and the wall paper was peeling off the walls.  The hall that led to these rooms was strewn with dirty laundry.

There was a door at one corner of the hall that opened to another set of stairs leading up to a narrow hallway and two small rooms at the top of the house.  One room had a small kitchen sink in it.  Both were painted a once garish now faded dirty pink.  At the end of this third floor hall was a door that led to an open turret with a distant view of the bay and San Francisco.

We went down to the basement.  Part of it was directly below the dining room.  It had been a double car garage but the concrete floor was now covered with what they called in those days “rubber” tile.  There was a toilet behind a door in one corner.  The window was boarded up, but the ground outside had been piling up with mud for years and the mud had been leaking for a long time in at the bottom of the boarded up window and down the wall in back of the toilet.  Behind another door was a dirt basement area the size of all of the rest of the ground floor of the house, and in the middle of it a gravity feed coal fired furnace that had been converted to gas.

Frank X. Flood said, “The house has eighteen rooms, and has been converted to nine apartments.  You live in one and rent out the rest in order to make the utilities, taxes and payments.”  The fact that the nine apartments had only one toilet—or two if you count the one in the basement—did not matter to us.  The fact that the nine apartments could be called apartments because in the days when the house was built it was modern and rich to have a washbasin in each bedroom instead of the wash stand with bowl and pitcher of the previous generation, and so each bedroom could now be called an apartment; and the fact that the ninth apartment must have been the basement—where he said during the war they had rented out camp cots by the night to shipyard workers…

The place was huge, weird and a wreck.  We could have it for only a little more than was being offered for our place on College Avenue.  We said we’d take it.

*

The Early Paintings on Harrison Street…
We moved to Harrison Street at about the time Jean and I went to work at the Oakland Art Gallery in late 1954.  Only two of the apartments were still rented by the time we moved in.  One apartment was rented to a young woman with a small child; the other to a middle aged woman, a man who was her son, and a young boy who was the man’s son.  The woman showed Jean how to wallpaper; the man showed me how to run a snake down the sewer line which was clogged, broken at a joint just above the basement floor with the sewage running out the door and down the driveway.  Soon enough all these people moved out.  We did not try to rent out the apartments.  So much for paying the utilities, mortgage and taxes with rents.

With everyone gone but us, I began a process of rejuvenation which consisted of repainting most of the rooms.  Serious stuff, like leaks in the roof I tried to fix without putting on a new roof which we could not afford.  The leaks were never very well fixed.

While we were still on College Avenue, I had begun to make what were later called “color field” paintings—see 1953-54, Abstracts and Figures, the paintings Crisis 1 and Talking of Dawn—and in the process had painted over all but one of the large figure paintings from 1954-4 with all of one color or another. After I had painted half a dozen of the Harrison Street rooms with all one color or another, I never tried “color field” again, and also gave up “abstract art.”

One of the first shows I worked on at the Oakland Art Gallery was an exhibition of the collection of Esther Fuller. The Art Gallery had been set up, along with the Snow Museum of Science (stuffed animals from old man Snow’s early 1900’s safaris) and the History Museum (an old house on Lake Merritt filled with junk no one could figure out what to do with—plus a serious collection of California Indian baskets) as a department—like a branch—of the Oakland Public Library.  Esther Fuller was a painter, was a member of the Art Gallery Committee of the Oakland Public Library, and with her husband ran a restaurant where the movers and shakers of Oakland and Piedmont often ate.  For Paul Mills, to show her collection was an important political move, establishing him in her good graces and through her to the rest of the Art Gallery Committee and also to who might know whom in the East Bay power elite.  The only problem was that Esther’s collection consisted mostly of miscellaneous unframed and unmounted drawings and watercolors by various local artists—including many of her own. 

My first job was to mat all these things.  Cutting the mats left behind a lot of smallish rectangles of cardboard.  Then there was the installation.  We—Mr. Gibson, the handyman, and I—put up plywood panels where Paul wanted them, and painted them either black or earth red.  Paul was not especially attached to the 4 x 8 foot module the panels came in.  We did a lot of cutting to special sizes that made a lot more rectangles of  ½ inch plywood painted in the theme colors of the show.  I took the scraps of cardboard and plywood home.

My head was filled with imagery from old travel books (anything to escape the hell of my soul) and from Jung on Alchemy, The Secret of the Golden Flower, and individuation and the Self.  I started painting on the little panels, pictures of the “four-flower” (a Jungian mandala), travel scenes in Italy, Spain and an imagined North Africa and Eastern Mediterranean coast.  I also painted pictures of my own body as I imagined it, and painted still lifes of tall black bottles in the dark.  I made lots and lots of little pictures—there were maybe a hundred of the little cardboard or plywood panels from the Esther Fuller show—and some larger paintings on canvas… a big “dining room picture” of a still life on a table with architectural surroundings a  big still life of Medusa’s head, a big “black bottles” (with a black bowl that reflected the stars) still life at night by the sea, a couple of tall vertical landscapes,  and a couple of “mosques,” domed buildings with towers and gardens by the sea.  The Oakland Art Gallery purchased the largest, best of these “mosques” on the occasion of my one person show as the result of receiving the Gold Medal in the Oakland Art Museum annual exhibition in 1959.

Click the image to go to the pictures.