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Issue link: http://digital.hylandmagazine.com/i/292359
If memory serves, though I cannot back it up via the Internet, Oscar Wilde once remarked, "The low room is a beautiful room." Henry Johnson's house, is low ceilinged and cozy, hung with paintings: flowers, still lives and portraits, his favorites being "anything by my daughter, Amanda Christabel Johnson, who lives and works in Del Ray Beach, Florida." Johnson's is an intensely personal space; one intuits that every art work and ornament has a meaning for him. The living room, with its yellow satin stripe upholstered Sheraton-style settee made in the 19th century by William Campin, Baltimore, is thick with books and paintings, urn-like lamps and a large gilded mirror above the modern but cozy fireplace. This house is a repository of life artifacts. In an accompanying photograph, at its center, there is an Oh Henry! candy box supporting a miniature cannon above. These two items combined are metaphors of the life, good humor and collections that abide here. The cannon speaks to the explosive array, the depth and breadth of memory, through formed objects: the Oh Henry! candy box, the sweetness, the sheer delight of it all! No manufactured, overly styled, staged and vapid design story here, just a life with all of its irregularities, ironies and juxtapositions, the latter eloquently posed in the hangings on one wall of the master bedroom above the bed; A Danny Dudrow mid-century abstract painting, in tones of orange and pink, cohabits with a Turner etching, along with small works of art by family and friends: photographer Erik Kvlasvik, Rome; John Waters, Divine; Alessandra Johnson, Nude; and a David Brewster. At the base of the bed, an antique quilt, HYLAND