THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER
THE DAUGHTER OF ARTIST J.B. BLUNK RETURNS TO HER CHILDHOOD HOME TO LOVINGLY RESTORE IT AND LAUNCH HER OWN CREATIVE CAREER
The iconic residence of J.B. Blunk gets a next-generation update
“DURING MY OWN TIME IN JAPAN, I BEGAN TO REALIZE HOW SPECIAL MY UPBRINGING HAD BEEN.”
“When I was 12, I wished my dad was an accountant who drove an Acura — I so badly wanted a normal life,” says Mariah Nielson, whose adolescent existence was anything but. She lived in a hand-built cabin perched on a densely wooded hill at the end of a dizzyingly windy road in Inverness. And instead of a calculator, her father, the iconic artist J.B. Blunk, wielded a chainsaw.
But the complaints of this petulant teenager were fleeting. Her artistic upbringing (her mother was a teacher-turned-weaver and a textile expert) laid a foundation for a series of creative and intellectual pursuits. After studying art history and working as an architect for many years, her talents and family tree have recently come full circle: From behind a wide desk fashioned from salvaged wood set in the bedroom of her childhood home, Nielson (and her business partner Fanny Sanger, daughter of chef and restaurateur Alice Waters) just launched Permanent Collection, a line of vintage-inspired jackets, simple leather sandals and ceramic cups modeled after her father’s designs, all crafted with exacting standards of quality and craftsmanship.
Nielson says it on was a trip to Japan when she was 16 that she and her father’s worldviews began to converge. Decades earlier, Blunk had been drafted during the Korean War. Although he had been studying physics at UCLA, he was newly enamored with ceramics and spent weekends off the base, exploring the mingei, or folk craft shops, of Japan. One fortuitous meeting led to another, and in 1951 he left the Army and stayed on in Japan, studying ceramics and wood-block printing with masters including Rosanjin Kitaoji and Toyo Kaneshige.
“During my own time in Japan, I began to realize how special my upbringing had been,” says Nielson. “And I saw first-hand the style and culture that had influenced so much of my father’s work.” And that work, in addition to the hulking-yetgraceful wood sculptures he became so well known for, included the very home she grew up in, where unfinished redwood planks abutted clean-lined windows modeled after Japanese paper screens and delicate, hand-painted ceramics filled the rough-hewn shelves.
The story of how the home came to be, like so much of Blunk’s life, is cast with notable and generous characters from the art world. He expressed his desire to relocate to Northern California to none other than the artist Isamu Noguchi, whom he had befriended in Japan. Noguchi connected him with the surrealist artist Gordon Onslow Ford, who was building a home on his sprawling plot of land in Inverness. Blunk started out as essentially a construction assistant, cutting and hauling beams, but the two men developed a friendship and Ford offered to let Blunk build a home and studio on his land. Blunk and his first wife, Nancy, assembled the structures by hand between the years of 1957 and 1962. There was a modest 1,300 square foot two-story home, a “clean studio “for painting and ceramics, and a barn for the couple’s two horses. Once the surrounding trees proved too strong a muse for the artist to ignore, the barn became Blunk’s woodworking studio.
“In 1960, J.B. found a really large piece of cypress in Inverness,” says Nielson. “As a thank you to Gordon he carved him a chair using only a chainsaw. It was his very first piece in that medium.” Over the next
decade his artistic star began to rise, and soon he was doing commissions for everyone from Lawrence Halprin to the Oakland Museum of Art to the University of Santa Cruz to the Zen Center. Nielson grew up during this prolific period, and she remembers launching an imaginary restaurant out of her father’s woodshop. “It was called Chach Kazeur and I served sawdust soup in bowls made of scrap wood. He was constantly working in his studio, and this was how I got to spend time with him,” Nielson recalls.
Sadly, her time with her father was cut short. Blunk died in 2002, when Nielson was just 21. “Before he died he told me to take care of the house and make sure there was always art being made on-site,” says Nielson, who teamed up with Ford’s Lucid Art Foundation to start an artist residency at the house and studio, both of which were sitting empty by 2003, once her mother moved out. But it wasn’t until 2006 when Nielson returned to take up her own creative endeavors in her childhood home. She was an architect with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in San Francisco at the time and started coming home on weekends to begin the process of cleaning out and updating the 50-year-old dwelling. There was much work to be done.
“I took absolutely everything out of the house, and I put only some of it back in — there was a lot of stuff that wasn’t necessary,” says Nielson. “I cleaned out the pantry, and there was canned food from the 1960s.”
When Nielson began, the walls were virtually covered, sometimes two layers deep, with art and other decoration. “Everything from large