My Decorated Homes
by Rosemary Fox

Way back in 1974, wanting to make an idyllic life in the country for ourselves and our two small children, my husband, Joel and I escaped the concrete and smog of Brooklyn, where we’d grown up. We had bought three acres of land with another couple in the obscure hamlet of Lanesville in Greene County, literally flipping a coin to decide who got which half. For the next three years, while I watched the kids at home, Joel spent every weekend, holiday and vacation making a 250-mile round trip to build us a little house.

I still don’t know how he learned to design and build; he was a draftsman for engineering and architecture firms and had neverconstructed a thing in his life. My mother called the house “jerry-built,” and it was a bit of an experiment. Still, it kept us warm and dry for nine years.

My identity as an artist had its humble genesis during that time. I had drawn and painted from the age of three; but beyond a class or two at the Art Students’ League and the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan before I was old enough to vote, I was self-taught. In isolated Lanesville, I borrowed from children’s books of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s to make art for the kids (mobiles, painted pillows, framed pieces and—the start of a few sales—painted furniture). We sold the house and Joel began work on a bigger and better one in the deliciously populated town of Woodstock in Ulster County. Eventually—the house-building thing had become addictive—we moved again; this time over the hill to Shokan.

While renting, as we always did between living in Joel’s places, I discovered the craft of hand-painting tiles. It was so much fun that for the new kitchen in our Shokan house I churned out a behind-the-stove mural, spot tiles for the back splashes and an overall design for the top of the expansive kitchen island. The theme was Renaissance Italy: fish being spilled from a bucket onto a marble slab by a young girl in front of a 17th-century landscape and six-inch square images of kitchen implements, bread-and-wine still lives, and all sorts of people doing food-related things—especially eating. The island was covered with floating fruits and nuts inspired by old botanical paintings. I also decorated tiles of different subjects for the bathrooms and sculpted a terra cotta relief plaque of birds that was set into the chimney behind a woodstove. The people who bought the house a few years later liked my tiles very much. And in the meantime, the owners of our previous home commissioned me to do tiles for their kitchen and a bath.

Joel built us two more houses. During our life in the next-to-last our son went off to college and in the last—across the river in Rhinecliff—our daughter did the same. In each place I painted more tiles and created relief plaques that went over fireplaces and into chimneys. I also discovered that installing special elements like old doors and windows, columns, floor registers, hardware, and barn beams could add a singular beauty to the interiors of our houses. I did some illustration for books, magazines, newspapers and print ads, too. Here and there I’d get a commission for more tile work, murals, or painted furniture...

Last of all, we bought a tiny house in Rhinebeck and carried out our first renovation: gutting, rearranging spaces, nearly doubling its size. In the fiercest burst of zeal yet (because I knew this gratifying but exhausting nomadic life was reaching its limit), I spent two years on ceramics for the renovated Rhinebeck house: all Dutch-themed, from medieval times through the early 1900s. Inspiration came from some of the thousands of art reference books in my own library. The result was three murals, four painted sinks, a hundred or so spot tiles and, set into two brick walls that meet behind one of the woodstoves, a series of red clay high-relief plaques depicting a farm house, a wheat sheaf, trees and all the animals and birds you’d expect to find on a 17th century Dutch farm.

Last summer at the end of August, shortly after the work was installed, Joel died while I was away visiting our son and his family in California. Totally unexpectedly, my partner of 42 years was gone, and our long collaboration was over. My kids are designing a website for my new business, Rosemary Fox Designs. My friends are cheering me on. I have a great life coach named Sarah. I’m sad and excited, scared and hopeful, and overwhelmed on top of it. One thing: I’m never bored. It’s a whole new life.

Much of Rose’s work is featured on her website, rosemaryfoxdesigns.com. Currently she offers one-of-a-kind painted tiles, dishware, relief plaques and both originals and best quality prints of wall paintings, drawings and collages. Commissions are a specialty. She also provides local consultation and help in finding unique touches for interiors. Studio visits are welcome. Contact her at 845-516-4346 or 845-706-1137.