Surrounded by eclectic beauty
Crystal Owens’ art studio fills with natural light from clerestory windows across the top of the crowded room in her Pine Shadows home.
Walls are lined with paintings and other artwork, some of it by her, others by students in Art League Houston’s Healing Arts, where Owens volunteers and is inspired by those around her.
There’s a stack of grapevine wreaths decorated with bottles of Tabasco and crustaceans, and a big bag of faux pomegranates waiting for another project to begin. An easel holding a large-scale canvas is unfinished, waiting for her next session with a paintbrush.
A handful of vintage-looking oyster ceramic plates rests on another counter, and Owens sizes them up. The Little Rock, Ark., native is playing with color and glaze and notes that it separated on one, leaving an unusual design and texture. A happy accident, it’s her favorite.
Crystal and her husband, Don, have lived in this ranchstyle home near Tanglewood since 1987, when their now 31-year-old twins — Leigh Owens Fitzgerald and Jordan Owens — were a year old.
Built in 1960 and designed by Talbot Wilson of Wilson, Morris, Crain & Anderson — a firm that did much of the architecture on the Astrodome — the 4,400-square-foot home still holds its midcenturymodern charm.
Crystal discovered her passion for art years ago, when she needed a new creative outlet, and along the way she found a whole new community of friends and developed a love for art that’s evident in every room in the home. Finding herself
In the mid 1970s, Houston was jumping. It was a hot place for start-up companies, and Crystal landed here not long after college to start a spaceplanning/design business with a partner. That partner eventually married and moved away, but before she did, a boyfriend set Crystal and Don up on a blind date.
He sang Don’s praises, then noted there was just one thing: He was divorced and had custody of his three children.
It might have been a dealbreaker for another woman, but Crystal thought it made him interesting.
Don was 40 and she was 27 when they met. A few years later when they married, Don’s kids were 8, 13 and 15 years old. The couple’s twins were born the year Don’s youngest was a senior in high school.
Now 81, Don’s a retired dermatologist and dermatopathologist who worked at KelseySeybold Clinic for 50 years.
By the time the twins started school in the early 1990s, Crystal, now 66, decided to close her business. At the same time, she needed something creative in her life.
She found Art League Houston and signed up for classes. She learned to paint and draw, but still life and portrait work bored her. After a class in abstract painting, she was hooked — it was less about duplicating another image and more about inventing her own ideas.
Her children’s school, Briargrove Elementary, also benefited.
“Back then, they had a fulltime art teacher … . I showed up and said, ‘Do you need any help?’ and she goes, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ” Crystal said. She went to the school three to four days a week and did whatever the teacher needed, prepping supplies or helping students.
“It was so much fun for me because I didn’t realize, really, that my work provided me with a creative outlet of designing every day, all day. When that went away, I had to find something to do to replace it,” Crystal said. Friends everywhere
As Crystal discovered new art techniques and met new people, their home filled up with all forms of art, and each piece comes with a tale of how they met the artist, where they discovered a new gallery or how Crystal turned some found object into a quirky piece.
They admired Texas sculptor Jesus Moroles, and there’s a mortar-and-pestle-like granite sculpture and a chair with a granite seat in their living room.
Houston artist Dixie Friend Gay is a friend, and her paintings pop up in various rooms, including a lily-pond scene Don bought Crystal for Valentine’s Day a few years ago. “I get to wake up every morning, and that’s what I see,” she said of the piece she keeps in their bedroom.
There are pieces by Susan Budge, Sharon Kopriva, Mark Chatterley, Karen Garrett, Virgil Grotfeldt, Steve Parker, Charlie Jean Sartwelle, Emily Sloan and others sprinkled throughout the house.
A Lee Littlefield garden sculpture adds color and whimsy to landscaping outside a big dining-room window. There are other outdoor sculptures, a Damon Thomas metal and ceramic group of blackbirds, a cluster of ceramic flowers that Crystal made herself and a Sally Babbitt obelisk.
What looks like a festive Christmas tablescape in the dining room is actually an assembly of twisty pieces of red ceramics by Jessica Kreutter. Owners are drawn into her art as they arrange or rearrange the pieces as they like.
Stately oak paneling lines walls in the spacious livingdining area where the couple hosted Don’s retirement party, children’s engagement parties and a variety of gatherings of family and friends.
Much of the home is covered in gray-white marble tile that once was installed in a downtown bank. It’s filled with an eclectic mix of furniture — black midcentury leather sofas that were an early purchase, a small Platner table and an old French daybed that’s been restored.
On one wall near the living room is an assemblage of silvery curlicues; they’re really shavings from big PVC pipe that Crystal gathers whenever she happens upon them.
Found objects — other people’s discards — are favorites of Crystal, and she’s occasionally roped Don in as a helper.
There’s a piece covered in flattened bottle caps — gathered from parking lots — that have been gold-leafed. Another is a mannequin covered in the shattered pieces of green tempered glass swept up from the floor of a supermarket.
“We were always gathering things. We’d be driving by somewhere, and she’d say, ‘Wait, Don, we need to get that,’ ” he said, laughing.
At some point, he took pride in what he could find for her.
“He called me from work one day and said, ‘They’re doing some pipes by the office. Do you want me to bring some (PVC shavings) home?’ Oh, yeah,” Crystal said. A lucky man
In the 18 months Don’s been retired, he’s finding his own new things to do. He’s become a gym rat, walks an hour a day and plays golf with a few other retired physicians. He jokes about the intense competitive spirit that rises when they get to the last three holes, where they bet 10 cents a hole.
Seven years ago he got a diagnosis of multiple myeloma, a form of cancer that few survive as long as he has. He’s also coped with Type 1 diabetes for 60 years; he got that diagnosis in medical school, when classmates had to draw their own blood and test their blood sugar.
“I feel very fortunate. I can’t get over it, really, that I am so lucky,” Don said. “Maybe I have some purpose left, I don’t know. We’ll see.”
Artist Crystal Owens and husband Don have filled their home with inspired works, both by her and Art League Houston students