Perspectives: The Birthplace of Hemingway

Last September my boyfriend and I traveled to the Chicago suburb of St. Charles for a week of work training. As he had never been to Chicago, we decided to make a little trip of it and arrived the Friday before in order to take advantage of the city over the weekend. We spent the first day and half exploring downtown and on Sunday made an excursion to another of Chicago’s suburbs, Oak Park, riding the Metra to arrive in the quiet, tree-lined residential neighborhood for one purpose: to see the home and studio (and now museum) of America’s architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.

But that’s a topic for another post. Oak Park has the largest number of FLW-designed buildings in the world so, naturally, after our tour of the museum, we embarked on our own little walking tour of the neighborhood. As expected, we came across several other FLW houses, all singular and glorious, of course, before stumbling across the home of another luminary of American culture.

That home, pictured above, belonged to none other than novelist and sportsman extraordinaire Ernest Hemingway, from his birth in 1899 until the age of six. The 1890 Queen Anne too is now a museum, open to Hemingway fanboys as well as the rest of the general public. While we sadly did not have the time to peruse the museum, we did manage to squeeze in a Sunday brunch at Hemingway’s Bistro in the Write Inn just down the street – all quite appropriately, if unimaginatively, named. As an enthusiast of both Victorian architecture and Hemingway (the daiquiri and the writer), I knew I’d have to try to my hand at sketching the house.

And here it is. As the house itself is relatively straightforward in ornamentation, it seemed a good candidate for a more detailed sketching treatment. So rather than drawing in only a suggestion of material – a smattering of stone here, a patchwork of brick there – I penciled in virtually every shingle and piece of siding. With the color palette, however, I took a few more liberties, as the house does not deviate far from a monochrome mauvey-brown. Admittedly, I found this particular shade difficult to create, what with knowing nothing of color theory and all. So when my mix for the trim turned out a little too green and the paint for the cladding and roof a little too pink, I just went with it. After all, a little livening up of the place couldn’t hurt – a small fiction – I’m sure ole Hem wouldn’t have minded.

I ended up really enjoying the detailed sketch work and learned more about working with angles and perspectives. (You might have noticed some things that are off – the wrapping of the porch railing as it recedes around to the left side, the pitch of the roofs). This was also my first time trying out a new watercolor paper, which I learned the hard way is quite sensitive to erasure marks. Notes to self.

I even tried mixing in some silver metallic powdered pigment that I recently picked up on a whim in an attempt to achieve that slightly glittery-in-the-sun look of the asphalt porch roof. The novelty of glitter (always fun until it’s clean up time) quickly wore off when, after applying the powder directly to my palette and using the same brushes to mix and the same water to clean, the metallic ended up getting mixed into all my other paints. Fortunately, the effect is pretty subtle, as I only used a modest amount of sparkle (if a thing can be modestly bedazzled). But there’s another note for next time.