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100 Left: A doorway is curtained by tattered antique silk saris. Right: Werner-Vaughn painted the doorway faux marbre, with a trompe l'oeil transom window above. The floating egg painting by Werner-Vaughn has a white lily to represent resurrection. Classical torso fragment is painted plaster. Opposite page: Salle Werner-Vaughn in her wild garden, cultivated with flowering vines and fruit trees. The Charles James dress form was a gift from a friend who knew the couturier. that we can transform the world if we use our imagination," she says. "A bungalow could be a palace, if you imagined it." Here & There, which is pictured on these pages, is just such a palace. Much of the furniture is 18th-century French — romantic pieces, shapely daybeds and bergères, sometimes left in their original tattered conditions. Doorways aren't just passages but portals into ancient worlds, draped with shredded silk saris and tied with silk cords. Other doorways are painted to resemble marble, with faux transom windows looking into celestial landscapes, painted with fluffy white clouds on baby-blue skies. Pink and blue are Werner-Vaughn's favorite colors, and she has immersed the cottage in those delicate hues, just as she immersed her body in a sea of primroses as a child, face aimed toward heaven. Her paintings, though surreal, hint at a theme of resurrection. One canvas depicts a large blue egg hovering in space above a white lily and a sword. "It is from Ephesians, about arming yourself with the sword of the spirit. A lily has to do with the resurrection," she says. She doesn't always know where a painting is leading her. "I sit down and start working and am transported into another realm, and everything fades away," she says. In one painting, she set out to depict the love she felt for her beloved dog Valor, now deceased. The canvas took shape in lavenders and greens, with a small dog in the foreground, looking towards a nude female figure, her back turned. They both are heading into a beautiful, but mysterious, landscape of color. What had started out to be a painting about her dog evolved to include her, all artifices stripped away. She doesn't read too much into her paintings, she says, but each one eventually reveals something about herself or the world. "All my paintings are surprises — sometimes I don't figure out the lesson for several years." These cottages, with their rooms of carefully selected and placed furnishings, are meant to lend meaning to her artwork and, in a larger sense, the world. "Rooms are like a palette," she says. "By giving a room a color, it gives it a dimension. I create space and volume through the placement of objects — I put objects in rooms to articulate the world." In her advancing years, Werner- Vaughn knows her time and energy are limited, but she's not finished. "I want to save more old houses," she says. "They are the beginnings for my art — houses inspire what I have to say. And I have more to say." (continued from page 97)