His Theory? Color Chaos
La Cieneguita, Mexico
“FORGET the address,” Anado McLauchlin says on the phone. “That’s like a dream: it doesn’t exist. How’s your Spanish? Tell the cabdriver: near the balneario de Guadalupe en La Cieneguita. That’s the bathhouse. Or the casa de los colores — that’s the way a lot of them know us.”
Not this cabdriver. After driving the five miles or so from the arty mountain town of San Miguel de Allende, he turns onto a cobblestone road, stops in front of an old church and declines to continue.
“There’s nothing there,” he says firmly.
A short time later a search party is dispatched in the form of Richard Schultz, a tall, bearded man who, thanks to the legalization of same-sex marriage in California (where he and Mr. McLauchlin keep an apartment), is Mr. McLauchlin’s husband of two weeks. Mr. Schultz leads the way up a steep road, past a crumbling stone wall covered with morning glories. The braying of their four foundling burros is heard. At last, Mr. Schultz arrives at the wrought-iron gates of their home.
The first thing a visitor experiences, looking through those gates, is a blast of purple. It’s nothing so static as pigment on a surface — it’s a force.
Barely an inch of this home, which has been a work in progress since Mr. McLauchlin and Mr. Schultz bought it in 2001, is without color and decoration. Much of it is in mosaics of ceramic and glass. A vintage wrought-iron outdoor table and chairs are purple and yellow; one side of the house has been painted purple, then decorated with a mural of what appears to be an Eastern goddess held aloft by a playful, familiar-looking cherub.
Mr. McLauchlin, an assemblage artist who makes furniture, decorative objects and jewelry, is also bright with colors when he comes out to greet his guest. A short man with a beard, he resembles one of the benign hairy creatures in an Edward Koren cartoon. He wears a Buddha T-shirt over his jeans, rainbow-striped socks and leopard-print shoes.
His explanation of the mural on the house is itself a kind of mosaic. “Our Guadalupenized Ganesh,” he says, invoking the Mexican saint and the Hindu deity. “He’s the god who breaks through obstacles. She appeared to Juan Diego, an Aztec, in 1531, on a sacred hillside.”
That cherub looks like Mr. McLauchlin. “That’s been remarked on,” he says.
The interior of the house is another pinwheel of colors: pink and purple walls; a candelabrum painted purple and hung with Mardi Gras beads and Day of the Dead paper cutouts. It’s the decorating equivalent of leaving gray New York in winter and going to a blue-sky beach. After a season of beige modular sofas, the royal blues and crazy pinks are so intense, one feels they are saturating the skin and there is the possibility of a burn.
There is a home décor question, Mr. McLauchlin is told, that one trembles to ask: What’s your palette here?
Mr. McLauchlin seizes on the question with gusto, as if he has waited all of his 61 years to answer it.
“The palette is ‘no rules,’ ” he says. “When you have rules like only beige or oatmeal, you’re limited to that palette. When you use all the different colors, there are no rules, there is no editor. It’s very freeing.”
He gestures at the kitchen, which has red walls, a green ceiling and a yellow table. “This is the Anjelica Huston dining room,” he says. “A friend of mine had an Architectural Digest in her home. She had a dining room that was red and yellow, so this is my interpretation.”
The glass-covered tabletop has been embellished with tiny objects: colored bells, Cracker Jack charms, tarot cards, dominoes. The table’s purple legs are studded with tiny Christ figures. The chairs have been decoupaged by Mr. Schultz, who teaches art history online for a boys’ school in San Francisco, but whose primary job is looking after Mr. McLauchlin and the business.
The couple may look like old hippies, but business is good. Mr. McLauchlin says his pieces range in price from $150 to the thousands (he tends to make up prices on the spot), giving him an annual income in the low six figures. “The house is really a showroom — just about everything is for sale,” he says. “One wealthy woman from Austin came out and bought a painting and bought one of our couches.”
“Everything is impermanent — you’re going to lose everything anyway,” his partner says, not unhappily.“My dad was a real trip,” Mr. McLauchlin says when the talk turns to biography. “He was a womanizer. I have two illegitimate brothers I’ve never met, and when my dad died I called up the woman who gave birth to them and invited them to the funeral. Supposedly they were sitting behind us.”
Did he turn around and look?
“I don’t think so.”
He fetches a photo of his father, a dark-haired good-looking man, as polished as Mr. McLauchlin is unkempt — his shrink said he should keep the picture out, he says. Asked why, he stumbles to answer, then tells a story.
“I was in bed about 4:30 this morning, holding Richard, and I thought about my dad and I started weeping,” Mr. McLauchlin says. His father, who thought he was a punk hippie, “never really got to know me,” he says. “He would have enjoyed the fact that you were coming.”
How did his father die?
“He was with his mistress in this private plane coming back from Bermuda. I was this hippie artist in Oklahoma. I was at this art opening. I felt kind of odd. I walked outside and this big brilliant thunderstorm was coming across the Oklahoma sky, and that was the thunderstorm that took down my father’s plane. My mother found out about it on TV.”
Art school at the University of Oklahoma was not satisfying (his work was too decorative, according to his professors, he said), so in 1971 Mr. McLauchlin dropped out and went to New York. There were the usual survival jobs (cabby, delivery boy) while he did poetry readings and performance art; there was an extended stay in an ashram in India, where he was given the name Anado; and a move to Marin County, Calif., where he made his living as a landscape gardener and started working seriously on decorative furnishings.
“I’d find things in junk stores and paint them and embellish them,” Mr. McLauchlin says. “With no rules you can do just about anything. I did a laundry hamper with a Tibetan Buddhist thing.”
He met Mr. Schultz in 1998, on the Internet, in an AOL chat room. They visited San Miguel de Allende two years later. Mr. McLauchlin recalls what enchanted him about the place: “The color, the festivity, the lovers in the street, the burros, the chaos.”
Their property, when they found it in the summer of 2001, was a wreck: a two-story stone house that had been designed to look like a Swiss chalet and was inhabited by scorpions. The interior walls were a faded orange, the fixtures had been stolen. They paid $100,000, then spent about $30,000 renovating. They whitewashed the interior, creating a clean canvas, and Mr. McLauchlin began throwing up colors. There were mistakes — the oranges and blues he used for the upstairs balcony overlooking the living room evoked a Howard Johnson — but when they happened, he just tried another color.
“Mistakes are the best thing,” he says. “Then you can always get real crazy and inventive.”
The house continues to be a work in progress. Colors change, new studios are built. Art lovers and artists come through. Mr. McLauchlin also runs workshops for artists who are blocked (information on tours and workshops is available at madebyanado.com).
“With the no-rules concept, you can get unstuck pretty easily,” he explains. “I also have a Day of the Dead workshop, which is not only about creating art but honoring a loved one. I had one woman come out here who had not gotten over a 35-year breakup with a guy. They were going to come to San Miguel, but they broke up 35 years ago, so she felt she had to come here. She made a little altar with his picture.”
Did she get over him?
“I don’t think so. I never saw her again, but I don’t think she did. She was pretty depressed.”
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