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Lipstick & bed.
Oil on wood
71x33 inches (180 x 84 cm) |
<sorry, can't get it to portrait view..>
Cyrtostachys renda are also known as sealing wax or lipstick palms.
An artist friend and self-taught carpenter created a seven-foot panel made from the wooden strips of my bed that broke.
Applying paint with broad house-painting brushes on a wide wooden surface was an exhilarating change from dabbing on yielding canvas.
The bed broke five years ago and I'm still sleeping on a floor mattress. Nothing beats the floor as mattress support. A sunken floor is good too. This was how an architect I knew slept.
The surface of her futon was flush the surrounding floor. The room, as with most of the areas in her translucent home, was a series of spaces that melt into each other. The house had very few solid walls. It wasn't particularly big but the seamless connection of interior with plants-filled exterior -- which at certain stretches reached the house proper -- made it a spatially rich home.
Another remarkable modern tropical home is that of potter Iskandar Jalil. The Cultural Medallion recipient's home used to be a back-to-basics single-storey terrace that was part traditional Japanese, part Southeast-Asian, with timber floors on which he slept at night and floors that creaked underfoot.
When he renovated the house and added two more storeys, he felt no necessity for a bed
still. After a day of creative flow in his ground level work space that was filled with pottery, a painting or two in progress, and a
longkang (drain) of fishes diverted from the garden, he would retreat to the living and family space upstairs.
At bedtime he would unfurl his sleeping mat by a glass partition fronting an indoor courtyard, sleeping within inches of the moonlit plants.
