When my wife, Beth, and I moved to London, we discovered there was an art to preserving memories and feelings of home while leaving behind all the space in our house and trying to settle into somewhere much smaller.
London’s exorbitant housing prices were about as based in reality as an episode of the British TV show “Doctor Who,” so if we wanted to be in a city of 8 million people and not enough places to live, we were going to have to adjust to a rental apartment (sorry, “flat”) a fraction of the size of the house outside New York City we had to sell.
We had to decide what to discard and what to keep in the month between my wife accepting a promotion and starting her new job in London. That meant we would have to leave behind many beloved things that were too old, too big or too dispensable to travel with us. For my wife, that included her flower garden. For me, it included my drums. For my then-9-year-old son, Nicholas, it included a lot of his toys. I felt like a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art having to fit its collection into a small gallery in the upper-class (sorry, “posh”) London neighborhood of Mayfair (not that we could afford Mayfair).
Friends came by the house with their pickup truck to help us donate a sofa, chairs and gardening equipment to our church. I made many trips to the local recycling center and libraries in the car I later sold. Parents of my son’s friends dropped by to take their pick of toys he couldn’t take along, and we sold his vast, outgrown Thomas the Tank Engine collection via the classified ads on a local website. We literally found a buyer for our house in one day.
But we knew we also wanted to sustain certain ties to the past, so one thing we didn’t part with was our collection of my father’s art, which hung in our house. An expat himself, my father, Rolf, and my mother, Mia, had moved from Hamburg to Montreal, where I grew up. At work my father had been a respected graphic designer whose pieces were displayed at the Museum of Modern Art on a couple of occasions. But at home he was a painter. He spent hours in his upstairs studio surrounded by a clutter of canvases, crumpled tubes of paint, and works in progress propped up on an easel. Mind you, his work wasn’t always to my taste when he went through a period of very straight lines and cold colors. But as he aged, he seemed to relax, and so did his paintings. The lines flowed more freely, the colors warmed up.
While we chose a place to live and to hang the art, we faced the usual dilemma: less of a commute versus more space, with the all-important issue of school quality blended in. We decided on a borough in southwest London, known for excellent schools and with a one-hour commute for my wife. At first, we were dismayed: The flats we were shown were far too small for even the few belongings we brought along, which had fit in a blue 40-foot shipping container. Then we found a property with a garage.
As we unpacked the cardboard boxes and thick paper wrapping, we chose which of my father’s works to exhibit to ease the transition to our new home, like an artist changing medium but still holding onto his favorite set of brushes. Not that we were unique in trying to create a sense of belonging in London: About 84,000 Canadians and Americans live in the great city on the River Thames, according to the British Office for National Statistics.
By the time we were done, we had seven of my father’s pieces on display. One of his later pieces looked like a Montreal snowstorm, full of white streaks, while two other pieces depicted Hamburg in black-and-white expressionism. It was as if the art collection itself was an expat: We took some pieces away from their North American roots but others came home to their European ones. We held onto his more geometric works out of respect for him, but kept them in the garage for sheer lack of space, saving them to display should we move to a bigger home.
My son, meanwhile, quickly adapted to London. He had fallen in love with the city on a previous trip as a tourist, but I also think it helped to hang familiar posters in his room as soon as we moved in. That included a poster his grandfather conceived in his graphic design days, showing a paper airplane folded out of a musical score soaring skyward. It keeps company with the toys we managed to bring with us, which my son was so happy to see again he acted like it was Christmas morning and he was unpacking them for the first time.
I also chose the airplane poster because I wanted to keep alive my son’s memory of his grandparents. My father created all the pieces in our collection while a vibrant man who cycled to the tennis club. But about a year before we moved, he was in the hospital with lymphoma erasing his once-robust body. Within weeks of sketching in his hospital bed with a colored pencil in his sure hand, he was so frail his writing became illegible, and he passed away soon afterward. We hung the pencil drawing in our flat.
My mother, whose dabbling in art included collages of flower petals and fern leaves, survived her husband of 55 years, but I knew it would be difficult for her. About a month after we moved to London, she passed away. Two of her collages that hung in our house, and had hung in our flat since we moved, became another memorial.
When my parents were still alive, my son painted a picture at a summer art camp, with bursts of fall-foliage colors framing a bridge. The span rises from left to right like a link from our past to our present and it, too, has a place in our gallery.
Resource: http://blogs.wsj.com
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