John-Paul Philippe has been a good friend for over 30 years. We met through Huw, my partner, who was living in the same house in north London. John-Paul (J-P) lived in the attic room, which was also his studio, and these rooms were always atmospheric. Everything had its place, yet unexpectedly so. He was then and is now a maker of spaces that are considered and wholly memorable, with a singular aesthetic.
In 2003 he moved back to America – not as a painter initially, but working to commission for Simon Doonan, then creative director of Barneys. Here he went through something of a metamorphosis. From the flat, graphic planes of his paintings he moved into design and placemaking for the department stores. His installations varied in materiality and scale, and drew artist and artisan together. They ranged from delicate collaged screens made of backlit tissue paper depicting beautifully observed fauna and flora to a raw-steel sculpture that soars 15 metres through several floors of Barneys Tokyo.
J-P was brought up in the suburbs of Henryetta, Oklahoma, his extended family sharing a farm of 40 acres outside town. This is where he describes the first places he played, making camps and treehouses, damming the creek. He says he always knew he wanted to create something of beauty, and that play was very much part of the creative process. As a child he was allowed to hang out with the signmaker in his grandfather’s glass company and there started painting with flat colour on cardboard packaging. In his early teens he’d paint cows and shacks to sell for pocket money and, when shown a Bridget Riley by his art teacher, remembers saying, ‘I can do that,’ and rising to the challenge when encouraged to follow through.
After several years of living and working in his Manhattan studio, he began to feel worn down by the city and found himself drawn once again to nature. In 2007, he came across this cabin with five acres of land in Connecticut. The previous owner, John McNeely, was a naturalist and ornithologist. He first spied the little dwelling while flying with hawks in his microlight at Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, and went on to dismantle and reconstruct it on his land in Litchfield County.
McNeely kept an Andean condor named Veedor and a golden eagle at the cabin, and he would fly both at local shows. He’d made a clearing to land his microlight, but otherwise left the terrain untouched for the sake of the birds and biodiversity. In J-P he saw someone who would become a proper custodian, treating his estate in the right spirit.
When you leave New York’s Grand Central Station by train, the stops help to shape your sense of passage: Harlem– 125th Street, White Plains, Valhalla, Hawthorne, Pleasantville and on, horn sounding, to Chappaqua. Through wooded hills and swamps shaped by beavers come the placenames made by European colonists and taken from the original peoples: Pawling, Dover Plains, Tenmile River and Wassaic – meaning ‘hard or difficult work’ – the last stop on the line. The Mohawk tribe once fished and hunted in the area.
As you drive the half-hour to the cabin along the wide, boulder-strewn Housatonic River, you begin to feel the power of the rolling landscape. Open pasture, carved from the hills in the 18th century, is notable for never being far from new-growth forest. The old field-boundary walls that move through the regenerated woodland indicate the natural state of things as soon as control of the land is eased.
The cabin sits a stone’s throw from J-P’s barn studio. The wooded anvil of Red Rock rises steeply behind the clearing. A grove of sugar maples and the remains of an orchard point to previous tenure on the land, while tamarack and white pine frame an informal meadow that’s constantly under threat of takeover by native dogwoods and shadbush. A vegetable garden, caged against bear and deer, sits off to one side, but nothing else has been introduced save the sunflowers by the cabin. J-P describes his method of tending the land as a process of observation and edit. There is no plan: it is all about striking a balance. Reacting to a storm, for instance, or the invasive buckthorns. Let the place speak to you; listen and respond with a light touch and empathy.
John-Paul’s partner, Elvin, came to live with him in 2019, since when he has been a welcome disruptor. ‘He shook me up and he made me look at things differently. My work has evolved faster for his influence here.’ Elvin’s casita is one of several interventions across the site. A directional duckboard, which echoes his time working in East Asia, connects the cabin to the barn, and though this is very definitely America, the crossovers with rural Japanese living are many. It can be seen in J-P’s reverence for the natural world and in an aesthetic that honours nuance and the raw essence of things. In the culture of wabi-sabi, the appreciation of the imperfect, and the ability to know when less really does mean more.
A network of mown paths lace the property and link a series of moods, gentle interventions and harnessed atmospheres. A rock stack in the open shadow under the maples where, in the spring, the trillium and bloodroot grow. Through wet hollows, where ferns and Lilium canadense thrive, and out into the light through jewelweed to a stand of little bluestem grass.
The clearing is cut every autumn, when the ground is dry enough. Mowing keeps the dogwoods in check and within islands of grass, so that you can never see the clearing all at once, and gives the meadows the open conditions they need to thrive. These fields are very special indeed – as beautiful as any tended garden and arguably more so for being a native ecosystem. Bergamot, aster and rudbeckia flare brightly in late summer, but look closely and you find fringed gentian and blue lobelia hidden among them. J-P says of the invasive goldenrod that it has its place, and though the joe-pye weed has taken a strong hold close to the cabin – that is where it prefers to be, and it adds to the feeling of rightness by having found its niche.
Sit on the porch and look into the clearing and you feel a life is being lived authentically. Be still and you are quickly joined by birds: goldfinch and chickadee, hummingbird, woodcock and woodpecker. Look up and, although Veedor is long gone, you might see red-tailed hawks or an eagle. Listen and you hear the cawing of ravens up on Red Rock. In summer the meadows are illuminated at dusk with fireflies and in autumn with monarch butterflies. For once, one feels overwhelmingly, a balance has been struck here.
John-Paul Philippe is represented by Cristina Grajales Gallery in New York and Barry Whistler Gallery in Dallas, Texas.
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