The housewith the red
door
37 Reverie Fair / Oct., 2014
The house with the red door is still both home and work for Chris. She built a sleeping loft over the workshop, and opened the ground floor bedroom to friends and visitors. A room added to the back enclosed one of the limestone outcroppings. There’s a couch on it now, an old piano and a wood burning stove at its base. The round window glass in the front door is one of Chris’s, a deep green hummingbird.
Raven images appear all over Chris’s home. They are drawn on cards in the label windows of her file drawers, on refrigerator magnets, in framed pictures on the walls. Small raven shapes hang from strings of brightly colored seed beads as light pull cords, and a dusty hand-sewn black bird mask is draped over a cracked ceramic bowl on the ledge around the bedroom loft of her guest quarters.
In forty years, Chris has built a business, a network, and a community. On open studio nights in downtown Flagstaff, she finds friends and colleagues on every block. Through her company, Ravens Eye Creative Werks, she has sold glass, jewelry, graphic design and sand blasted silver and glass.
Chris came to Arizona to go to art school, and stayed to become a part of the art of Arizona. The creative flow of the Southwest swept her up, its life and land permeating her art. The life she’s experienced in the shadow of the mountains has become her livelihood. Like the hummingbirds, the canyons and the ravens that are captured in her artwork, she has become indigenous.