Cover story!

December 2008 - check out this month's California Homes magazine, whose cover story puts the spotlight our favorite new San Francisco designer, Claudia Juestel of Adeeni Design.




The cover article features a historically significant Victorian country house in Diablo, California, to which I have previously contributed a fair amount of work, including restoring and recreating the faux bois for the baseboards and doors in the main parlors and entry, the entry floor, and the ornamental overdoor panels in the living room.

Above: The panels over the windows and doors in the Living Room were painted by Lynne Rutter.
Artistic License associate Brian Kovac created a weathered wood finish for the beams in the newly built wine cellar.

I am so happy to see this work used in Claudia's fresh design, which is an eclectic, worldly mix, and celebration of the Victorian house's original features.


<-- The entry with its painted checkerboard floor and restored faux bois baseboards and casings.



Here is proof positive that you can live,
really live in a period home, with all its "dark" wood and traditional proportions, and still have a joyful, current interior.






click on images to view larger.
images 1 and 2 © California Homes Magazine
image 3 photo by Bernardo Grijalva

Lynne Rutter Murals & Decorative Painting

Language of Cloth Textile Show and Sale

Attention fashionistas and fans of color and fabric!
It's time once again for the Language of Cloth textile sale.

Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays
from November 28 - December 21, 2008
650-B Guerrero St San Francisco
415-431-7761

the blue: hand woven silk with a kotak-kotak pattern (grid) The issen-issen (batik filler patterns) fill in areas defined by the textured pattern of the weave. This design was inspired by an antique obi.

Every year my good friend Daniel Gundlach brings home a fabulous collection of handmade textiles of cotton and silk from Indonesia, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. Unusual one of a kind pieces blending traditional techniques with modern eclectic style. Wonderful for wearing, for decor, and with many affordable choices for gifts.

the orange:
hand -drawn batik tulis on Korean silk jacquard, in a flowing basket weave. The batik follows the pattern of the weave in some areas.

Each piece is unique, hand-made using a very labor intensive process, and the sale of this work supports the artists, and the communities in which they were created.

Lynne Rutter Murals & Decorative Painting

Library Children's Room Mural completed!

Sierra as Melisande

We recently completed a sizable  mural for the Children's Room in the Burlingame Public Library. I am so thrilled with the transformation of this space!

The mural was commissioned by the Burlingame Library Foundation to commemorate the centennial celebration of the Library.

My goal was to create a look that appears original to the room, as though it's always been there. Indeed it is hard to imagine the room without the paintings.

the entire room was treated as part of the mural

The North "main" mural wall is about 37 feet wide and the ceilings are 20 feet high. The first 5 feet of the walls are filled with bookcases, so all of the murals had to be painted with perspective from below eye-level.

There is a large metal grate and a little maintenance door in this wall, that I worked into the design, so the architecture became part of the composition of the mural.

small maintenance door transformed into a secret castle entrance

I had a lot of fun re-imagining this little door area, to make it an entrance to a castle, or possibly, another world.

Faraway Castles, approx. 9 feet wide

mice and faeries among the poppies

We added images all around the room, so the room becomes a story, its walls the pages of a favorite book.  Details like tiny faeries, mice, and California poppies become more noticeable when you get up close.

read a book!

Centennial Mural story in San Mateo Times

Bay Area Art Quake review by Phil Gravitt!

My thanks to:
Burlingame Library Foundation for their support and this amazing commission
the Burlingame Librarians for all their research and enthusiasm
interior design consultant Michelle Nelson
I would especially like to acknowledge the contributions of my associates Sierra Helvey and Melka Myers who were instrumental in the design and production of this project.

Lynne Rutter Murals and  Decorative Painting

Library Children's Room Mural- in progress

The Russian Prince brings home the Firebird

This week we will be finishing a large children's room mural for the Burlingame Public Library,

Commissioned by the Burlingame Library Foundation, the murals draw inspiration from the "Golden Age of Illustration" the great storybooks of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, like Maxfield Parrish, N.C. Wyeth, Arthur Rackham.

The Burlingame Library is a charming Spanish Revival style building was designed by architect E. L. Norberg and completed in 1931.
The children's room is a large space with soaring, beamed ceilings, textured plaster walls, and a lot of odd angles. This presented a challenge as there is no one focal point to the room, nor is there a large uninterrupted space where one might normally site a mural.
So I designed a mural that uses the architecture, grates, doors, and arches, as part of the composition.

Work in progress on the north wall.

We painted the murals on canvas in my studio, then glued to the walls and in some areas, additional painting is done on site.

The Foreign Prince, being cut out prior to installation.

installing the castle mural in an arch

The Burlingame Library will "unveil" this mural during their Centennial celebration on Sunday, October 19, 2008.

Lynne Rutter Murals & Decorative Painting

Eye Candy

A splendid miniature eye portrait from the Victoria and Albert Museum, with a diamond teardrop

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, miniature eye portraits were all the rage. This was after the late 17th century rage for miniature portraits of any kind. They were painted most often using watercolor or gouache, on a substrate of ivory or parchment, then set into a bit of jewelry- a pin or pendant.

In Victorian times the eye portrait was often a piece of mourning jewelry, but the origin of this form was as a token of love.
I have had, for rather a long time, an obsession with eyes, used as symbols in my paintings. So naturally I am fascinated with these tiny symbolic paintings, the lover's eyes.

An assortment of lovers' eye jewelry  from the Georgian period

According to The Art of Mourning:
"Eye portraits are considered to have their genesis in the late 18th Century when the Prince of Wales (to become George IV) wanted to exchange a token of love with the Catholic widow (of Edward Weld who died 3 months into the marriage) Maria Fitzherbert. The court denounced the romance as unacceptable, though a court miniaturist developed the idea of painting the eye and the surrounding facial region as a way of keeping anonymity. The pair were married on December 15, 1785, but this was considered invalid by the Royal Marriages Act because it had not been approved by George III, but Fitzherbert’s Catholic persuasion would have tainted any chance of approval. Maria’s eye portrait was worn by George under his lapel in a locket as a memento of her love. This was the catalyst that began the popularity of lover’s eyes. From its inception, the very nature of wearing the eye is a personal one and a statement of love by the wearer. Not having marks of identification, the wearer and the piece are intrinsically linked, rather than a jewellery [sic] item which can exist without the necessity of the wearer."

I'd love to be a collector of these, or to have just one of them. Perhaps I will paint one of or for my own best beloved, as a follow-up to the maxi-eye portraits I painted a few years ago, of Erling Wold, myself, and our "adopted" daughter, Laura Bohn.

Eye portraits of Erling Wold, eye self-portrait, and Laura Bohn, at 250% of life size, oil on wood panels

Treasuring the Gaze more about Georgian lover's eye portraits.
Check out the highly enviable collection of Cathy Gordon
Oeil en miniature by Le Divan Fumoir Bohémien
Even more lover's eyes from Candice Hern

The Art of Mourning more about Victorian mourning jewelry
Interested in collecting? Antiques Roadshow has some tips.

Lynne Rutter Studio