We were looking for Hobbit houses. Wandering between high-end home design stores in the Helms Bakery complex in Culver City.
We were there only because I’d been intrigued by a free weekly article about an exhibit featuring the work of James Hubbell, the architect who had apparently invented the Hobbit design aesthetic. Cobblestones, logs, and sod.
Hubbell is also a painter, sculptor, stained glass designer, metal worker, and weaver. But right now, my husband and I were lost. We were following paths that led only into lighting shops, seeing no signs for an exhibit, and wondering whether we’d find a cottage just around the next turn.
Eventually we went into a furniture store, where I asked a clerk how to find the Hobbit House exhibit. She looked at me quizzically, and then at my husband. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, as if I’d gone mad, or had asked where to find Gandalf. Her confusion was understandable. I wasn't sure what we were looking for either.
James Hubbell is ninety-one, and though he lived just down the road in San Diego County, he’d never exhibited in Los Angeles before. I was from San Diego myself—and Hubbell had buildings, public art installations, and window art on display throughout the region—but I had never heard of him. He seemed to keep to himself.
We continued walking until we found a sign pointing us to a small exhibit hall, where to my disappointment, there were no houses. But there were many photos of Hubbell structures, along with much of his original art.
One of his dwellings had been designed for his four sons, the Boy’s House it was called, and it was no wonder why critics had invoked the architecture of Middle Earth. “Hobbit House” truly was the way to describe this brick and earthen structure melting into the landscape, studded with colorful glass windows and fantasy statuary. The Boy’s House was part of Hubbell’s compound, Ilan-Lael, located in the mountains near Julian. His aesthetic made me smile.
Hubbell is one of those entirely enviable people who master every art form. The exhibit also featured his paintings, calling to mind flowers and seas. His iron works curved and folded over, revealing bright gem blossoms in their hollows. And the stained glass! He had created an orange, red and purple fabled Firebird, burning blue at the wingtips. His Doors of Abu Dhabi had been commissioned in 1980 for an unnamed sheikh in the UAE, and Hubbell (surely for a princely sum) crafted eighteen glasswork doors over six months. They featured peacocks, and fire, forest creatures, and flowers of the richest gold. But at the exhibit, we only saw photos. The doors themselves had vanished into a mystery palace abroad, never to be seen by the public—or the artist—again.
Making my way through the exhibit, I became overwhelmed with the color, variety, and richness of Hubbell’s art, frequently crying out for my husband to come and see. Books of poetry were displayed because the man was a poet, too. Of course.
But the story of Hubbell’s chapel at Sea Ranch interested me particularly.
Designed in the 1980s, the chapel utilizes its environment as material. Its shingled roof tilts and bucks from a grounding layer of stonewall, animated like an eccentric lady’s hat. If not for fronds of green metal sticking up from the peak, it might almost be taken for part of the land.
When Sea Ranch Chapel opened in 1985, the architecture world went gaga, lauding James Hubbell, bestowing high profile architectural awards. Everyone wanted more. But then, curiously, the man took himself off the map. He never built another thing like it. Rather, he designed fanciful but modest elementary schools in Tijuana, and led a project to create parklets around the Pacific Rim, intended to serve as bridges for peace. He did continue work at Ilan-Lael, but having reached for the heights, seemed to prefer life out of the limelight.
His style, and use of the environment in art, draws comparison to noisy artists like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who instead of honoring the elements of earth in their work, wrapped them in material bound to become waste, who used environment primarily to draw attention to themselves.
Not that I blame them. Isn’t that what artists want? To be known? Seen. Honestly, that’s part of what drives me any time I put fingers to keyboard. Because where Hubbell, now pushing one hundred, has myriad artistic talents, I work in only one form. I try to convince myself I am genius, and want my creations to be read. To be praised.
But more often than not, my ambitions are disappointed. At the exhibit, there was a sense I had that James Hubbell was very much better than I was, and I did not like it.
What if, like him, I turned away from the lure of fruits and gain? Concentrated instead on nature, nurture and peace.
My husband says there’s a school of creative thought where art is created only to be destroyed, created for its own sake. It, like all of us, is meant to be temporary. So you paint, finish, and then burn. Sweep away the mandala. Write and hit “Delete.”
I cannot imagine the pain.
But if one did that, retreated from power and commerce, could one find the simplicity of joy in art? Could one, could I, live humbly and beautifully, like a Hobbit comfortably in possession of every needful thing? Could one (could I?) go back to ground after all of it and feel like it had been enough?
I come away from James Hubbell’s very first LA exhibition thinking about this, thinking hard: What should I learn from all of this? And then I keep wondering:
When will I learn it?
