Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Our Northwest North Carolina region has been experiencing a major heat wave and drought for most of the last two months. In fact, our August was the hottest on record (as measured by number of days in the 90s and 100s) since the records have been kept in 1928. So this past Friday, an all-day torrential rain that blanketed our area was much-needed and most welcome. (The region loved it despite accidents, flooded basements and sudden sinkholes showing up in people’s yards.)

The issue for Simple Living TV this past Friday was that we scheduled a shoot day for our crew. We had to shoot standups for our special program on simplicity and art—many of them outdoors—along with interviews for various upcoming segments.

Scrambling to make new plans, fate intervened by putting an angel in our path, an angel who made it all come out right. Friday’s angel is a woman named Jan Detter. Jan is a talented mosaic artist who has the Third Eye Studio in an older restored home in downtown Winston-Salem. Last Friday, Jan proved herself to be not only a gifted artist but a gifted, giving human being.

Jan Detter’s home-cum-studio is a work of art in and of itself. Every nook and cranny is a sight to behold, eye-candy for anyone with a taste for original art, happy hunting ground for our videographer Tim Snider (the one who first met Jan and recommended her to us) and director Frank Levering.

Jan is a ceramic artist and her work is everywhere around this older home: the bathrooms, the kitchen, outdoors, hallways. Even her closet is original. Instead of outfitting it with all the standard built-ins her huge closet space would permit, Jan installed round, rotating used retail fixtures. Her evening bags decorate the wall. One of the most striking pieces indoors is in the form of a life-sized pregnant woman created from seashells which graces the wall in her formal living room. (This work, she told us, was inspired by her first pregnancy at age 40 and made a number of years later.) In her studio out back, there’s the mosaic black dog she’s putting together for charity (his “fur” is black buttons, keys and other miscellania). And speaking of angels, Jan has been commissioned to create an enormous abstract angel that includes a “relicquary” in the stomach (a place for someone to stash treasures). Works of art surround her house, many of which were acquired in trade with fellow artists.

Jan—who granted us an on-camera interview in her hallway—describes herself as a “found artist” and works with items she picks up at yard sales, resale stores, even occasionally in dumpster dives.

I noted some ingenious ideas that I might incorporate in my own new home here in Mount Airy. She inspired me with her vision (I may make some more daring choices because of Jan, such as putting down a broken tile mosaic floor in my bathroom rather than using more standard materials). But she inspires most as a human being. Her generosity. Taking one look at our bedraggled crew, Jan dashed out into the rain to fetch a delightful Vietnamese luncheon. I say “luncheon” because that’s how she served it: in her Asian inspired dining room, on real china.