Style Scout: Real Cool

A painter’s passion leads to drop-dead gorgeous walls and ceilings.

Alicia Danzig in the color swirl of her work space.

Image credit: Tate Carlson

Recommended by the Editor

Style Scout: Bring on the Fresh Blood

Style Scout: In with the Old

By: Cy Winship |   April 2011   |  From the print edition

In our culture, cool has meant pretty much one thing for a long time: aloof disdain (coupled with edgy clothes and great hair). Hauteur. Paris Hilton, for God’s sake. Seriously—that’s kind of it. The enthusiastic and curious people we actually love being around aren’t considered cool.

I would love for that notion to change. I believe the most interesting people in our world are the opposite of bored poseurs. Think about it: Aren’t the coolest people you know the ones who change things for the better? New ideas are cool. Passion is cool. Lively curiosity is very cool.

This idea truly solidified for me when I met and worked with Alicia Danzig for the first time. I thought, “Now this is someone cool—someone I want to be like.” Her friends had described her as a wondrous loopy puppy of a person, and Alicia simply brings so much joy and passion to her work as an interior painter that I giggle like a giddy schoolgirl around her. OK. I don’t know if a grown man giggling is cool, but I don’t care, sooo . . . maybe it is.

A client had compelled me to call Alicia and check out her work. Her company is called Lulu Painting, so I often call her Lulu—which suits her. A recent import to our city, she left Vermont because this place just seemed right to her. Alicia started painting homes because her father did, and she used to help him. Somewhere along the way, she found art in the painting.

Stenciling calls up all sorts of groaning horror in me. Ugh! No more duck borders and hideous children’s-room murals. That’s what I expected, and so not what I got. Alicia’s eye was informed by working on rooms and canvas tents in Morocco; there she learned technique and, more importantly, a really cool design esthetic.

From the beginning, her ceilings made me crazy. “I want that!” I screamed: huge gorgeous patterns in simple indigo on white, black patterns from white tent canvas that demanded to be transferred to a modernist dining room. Floors, walls and ceilings are her canvases. And that fifth forgotten wall that I often paint black or citrine—what we generally call the ceiling—is her favorite thing to exalt.

I love it when someone does me one better. When we first worked together, I asked if she could replicate some aboriginal paintings on a client’s curved living room wall. What I had envisioned was only half as interesting as what Alicia delivered. These daring clients were the perfect match for Alicia: Their penthouse is full of funk and, yes, cool because of her.

Alicia changes how a room feels with her big personality and wild laughter and leaves some of that behind in her work. Now she and her design partner Erica Cooper (the loopy puppy description of Alicia comes from Erica) are opening their fab studio in the Semple Mansion on Franklin and LaSalle in Minneapolis this month. Pure genius: There, floors, walls and changing panels will showcase techniques, patterns and color so clients can see ideas manifested in real scale on real surfaces. OK, so what if we do this in orange on pink? It’s a great idea. I love wallpaper and tile and all sorts of textures and color. Why not walls painted by a real person in just the way you (or, if you’re smart, she) want to do it?

Our homes should reflect us. Even more, they can be enlivened by wonderful artists. Their images, textures and colors, their passions and curiosity, make our homes and us look more interesting. They also make us look really cool—passionate and alive, not aloof and disengaged. And really, isn’t that what we want?