Fun with paint

Inside a Riverside Colonial, a painter turns ordinary surfaces into extraordinary art

By Liz Jaros

Home Book Magazine Contributor

In the center of Jennifer Taylor’s Riverside home, wearing only English coats and impish grins, a quartet of monkeys dangle from the dining room ceiling. They hold tiny candelabra lamps with fabric shades and peer down mischievously at dinner guests below, and they keep company with the likes of two twig-crowned aluminum deer heads in the next room. Their presence within the walls of this Colonial, which shows totally traditional from the curb, exemplifies one woman’s appreciation for the extraordinary.

“The monkeys are just so ugly,” says Taylor – a mom, artist, shopkeeper and television actor by trade. “I went crazy for them.” After seeing the unusual chandelier in a catalog but gasping at the price, Taylor says she got on the phone and finagled a damaged model from its distributor. And with a little creative tinkering, a conversation piece was born.

In the eight years since she and husband Garry Henderson first purchased the home, Taylor has treated the interior like a three-dimensional canvas. Interspersing her own work with that of other artists and prolifically detailing the walls (and cabinets and floors) with paint, Taylor has created a space for her family that’s colorful, comfortable and truly original.

“When we first moved in the house was tasteful and beautiful, but not my style,” says Taylor. “There was a lot of wallpaper… It was very Laura Ashley.”

Taylor says one of her first priorities was an overhaul of the sponge-treated pink cupboards in the breakfast room. Offering a peaceful view of the backyard greenery, and located just steps from the galley kitchen, this room was going to be a major hub for her family and needed to be special.

“I wanted it to have a Provincial feel,” says Taylor, a native of Paris, France. Grapefruits, lemons, oranges and limes were brushed on liberally in an off-the-cuff process she likens to “unwrapping a present,” then combed over to create texture. Near the windows, on an informal dining table featuring a black leaf design, Taylor says she heaped layers of paint and polyurethane so “the thing wouldn’t know which way to chip.”

A self-proclaimed margin doodler in her formative years, Taylor says she owes her recent obsession with paint and color to a gift she received in 1985 from her husband. “We were living in California because I had a part on [soap opera] The Edge of Night. For Christmas, Garry gave me some oil pastels and canvas paper and something just came unleashed. I couldn’t stop.”

Taylor soon began “painting like crazy” and was producing so much that she had to throw some pieces in the dumpster. When she spotted neighbors digging them out and bringing them into their own homes, she thought she might be on to something.

Years later, when a friend who couldn’t afford a new coffee table asked her to revive an old one with paint, Taylor began stroking her signature fruit and vine designs on furniture. Using pieces that were old or plain and not valuable, Taylor quickly peppered the rooms of her own house with functional art.

In the living room, a piano back was adorned with gold leaves and a drab maple fireplace was brought to life with a faux velvet curtain and zigzag detailing. An old dentist’s cabinet was fitted with glass shelves, brushed inside with margarita green paint and detailed outside with cherry stain. Taylor also put original touches on the home’s wooden staircase risers and the mosaic tile floor of a powder room off the foyer.

“And I call this my rugoleum,” she says in the kitchen, referring to a bed of leaves painted on the backside of a cheap piece of vinyl flooring – a nice effect that illustrates Taylor’s thriftiness as well as her creativity.

Taylor enjoyed rejuvenating old furniture so much that when the Chicago television acting market cooled for a while, she decided to supplement her diminished income by opening an art shop, Painted Board Studio in Forest Park. And while she did eventually land steady work again (currently she can be seen as Becky the secretary on the locally produced Prison Break series), her “side” business is still a great source of pleasure. And her devotion to the arts is as strong as ever.

“I’m very involved in the Riverside Arts Center,” says Taylor, who’s been vice president of the organization for 13 years. Through relationships formed there as well as trades with other artist friends, she’s acquired several of her favorite art pieces, like the spinning wall portrait of her family that hangs in her home’s front hallway and a goopy, oil-covered silo shelved by the deer heads in the sunroom.

Even the accordion-style windows in Taylor’s favorite spot in the home, a breezy screen room addition with a tongue-in-groove, exposed beam ceiling and a terracotta tile floor, are commissioned works of art. And since Henderson is an artist himself – a professional art photographer who sometimes accepts original work in lieu of actual payment – new pieces are constantly being integrated into this already eccentric crowd.

Taylor wouldn’t have it any other way.