Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/793905
12 letter editor HUNT SLONEM A t times, a place and sense catch your imag- ination, and there is no shaking it. That's what I and other confidants feel about the mystic and surreal beauty of Houston painter Salle-Werner Vaughn's artist hamlet, three early-20th-century cottages clustered on wild and woolly acreage in Magnolia Grove near Houston's West End. Restored would not be the correct de- scription for these petite havens — they have been given coats of paint and finery that they never possessed in their heyday. PaperCity visual arts editor Catherine D. Anspon, creative director Michelle Aviña, and contributor Carol Barden share this fascination with the ephemeral Werner-Vaughn and her soft-surreal paintings and compound. For our spring fashion shoot, Aviña considered the artist colonies that thrived in the epoch of Yaddo, Bloomsbury, Ox-Bow, Provincetown, and MacDowell — then recreated the bohemia, angst, and freedom (pages 48 through 55). Werner-Vaughn's near-future plan for the enchanting Harmonium enclave is to create gardens and grotto for musical entertainments, poetry reading, and reverie. Anspon remembered a quote by the brilliant late museum director Walter Hopps: "To describe the nature of Salle Vaughn's paintings is as elusive as it would be to describe the flavor of ripe apricots … like much of Surrealist painting, it seems to exist outside literal time … The paintings, rather than declare, open portals for our imagination." Holly Moore Editor-in-Chief holly@papercitymag.com