Shared from the 11/19/2017 Houston Chronicle eEdition

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A BEAUTIFUL LIFE

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ARTIST KARIN BROKER WITH TWO OF HER WORKS, “FIGHTING PRETTY” AND “PICTURE PRETTY” (CONTE ON FORMICA).

Michael Wyke

Artist Karin Broker, a longtime professor of printmaking at Rice University, keeps her holiday decorating simple and stress free. But with her creative eye, her airy, light-filled Independence Heights compound also looks elegant enough to rival Martha Stewart’s work. For instance, Broker starts setting up her Christmas displays in late October so she can build them piecemeal, without rushing, during breaks from working.

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Michael Wyke, Molly Glentzer

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: A CRYSTAL JEWELED TOY GUN PIECE UNDER GLASS AT KARIN BROKER’S HOME STUDIO. A DETAIL OF “I LOVE YOU, JOHNIE,” A WORK IN PROGRESS FROM ACTUAL LOVE LETTERS SENT HOME BY A WORLD WAR II VETERAN. THE MAIN CHRISTMAS TREE IN BROKER AND MARK WITTE’S HOME IS PLANTED IN AN ANTIQUE URN AND DECORATED WITH GLITTERY ORNAMENTS AND HAND-BEADED GARLAND.

Karin Broker’s art and home blossom with feminism, realism, romanticism

She also knows when to stop, although not for aesthetic reasons: She resists the temptation to drape garlands across the 6,000-square-foot home/studio space because she knows how much more work that would entail on the back end.

“My time is valuable that way,” she said.

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A fine collection of vintage tabletop Santas and a dried reindeer topiary are among the first things she unpacks. Three faux trees, each with a distinctive personality, also make an appearance.

The most elaborate, planted so that it’s raised well above the floor in an antique urn, glistens with white lights and elegant gold, crystal and white ornaments that could easily find their way into one of Broker’s decadently pretty, glass-dome-covered sculptures. She has trimmed away more than half of the tree’s greenery — “Of course I couldn’t leave it alone,” she said — re-creating it into a green stick-tree, so she can see the ornaments better and give them breathing space.

Why not just buy a green stick tree to start with? That’s just not in her DNA. Broker is a master tinkerer, all year. No element of her home is safe from that.

Another of the Christmas trees, a skeletal, welded steel sculpture, resists embellishment. And then there’s the lit-but-ornament-free white tinsel gem. That one has sentimental value: It belonged to her 94-year-old mother, who left it up, year-round, for two decades. Broker welded it onto a sturdy marble base and put it on a portico outside the living room’s floor-to-ceiling, steel-framed windows.

Her mantra of simplicity extends to holiday entertaining. She relies on a trustworthy, tasty recipe for old-fashioned roast beef — the kind of meal she loved as a kid in the 1950s and ’60s in Pittsburgh, Penn.

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Converted from a transmission business, by a team that included Broker’s husband, commercial developer Mark Witte, and architect Heather Rowell, the warehouse compound won an AIA design award in 2016.

Viewed from the wide-open gravel yard, which is planted with a few well-placed young red oaks, the home/studio and its adjacent guest house look like a museum. If it seems audacious that an old industrial space in a transitional neighborhood could mimic a Louis Kahn classic, so be it: The plan was partly inspired by the landscaping of Fort Worth’s serene Kimbell Art Museum.

The home’s interior is a living embodiment of Broker’s art — a heady mix of feminism, realism and romanticism that balances flawless construction and the bit of sparkle she calls “girl germs.”

Domesticity comes naturally to her, although she had to learn to embrace that aspect of herself in the testosterone-fueled world of contemporary art.

Broker’s sculptural skills constantly come in handy for converting thrift-shop finds that share space harmoniously with industrial antiques and room-shaping furniture from Restoration Hardware. She’s always “changing stuff,” Broker says — resizing tables, painting, reupholstering, making pillows.

A gallerylike entry divides the two-bedroom home from her three-room studio; but really, it’s all a spectacular showplace for her work. The walls throughout are a carefully chosen warm white. A shade of wall paint just a hair off would make her drawings look dirty.

After living more than 25 years in a West End bungalow, Broker is finally experiencing the pleasure of living with her monumental drawings, like her many collectors do. She can spend hours, if she wants, re-reading and absorbing all the dense bits of text she has handwritten into the 6-foot-long pieces.

Or just pick up a small book: The complete text from her recent “Damn Girls” series has been published in a miniature tome crafted with the same proportions as the drawings.

Broker’s favorite piece, 2013’s “Fighting Pretty,” appears from a distance as a dark, botanical image of two lush blossoms that suggest the War of the Roses. The penciled-in text conveys a history of women who have disguised themselves to fight wars.

“It’s one I won’t sell,” she said. “I just love the idea of women having gone to war as men — pirates, even. I was stunned by how many there have been. I had so much information I had no white space. I even had to start writing over images, which I don’t normally do.”

Reams of paper are stacked by a printer in a corner of the largest room of her studio spring show, containing all the text for her next series, “I love you, Johnie.”

She gleaned the show’s tentative title from a 6-foot collage that incorporates a collection of letters written by a Texas couple during World War II. These new works — massive collages in warm, brown tones with layers of whitewashing that will be run through Rice’s presses before they’re finished — fill the walls of that room so beautifully it’s a shame they’ll eventually have to be sold. Broker only gets to live with some of her masterpieces for so long.

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Some artists live in chaos, surrounded by the clutter of objects that feed their creativity. Broker, however, prefers order in every way: even on vignettes she arranges on tabletops and the wide tile sills of the bathroom windows. Beautiful cabinets conceal everything in her huge, open closet. The laundry is impeccably decorated, too, all its supplies transferred from unsightly bottles into nice containers.

The room where Broker builds her glass-dome pieces — which somewhere holds years’ worth of collected small objects — is also as fastidiously tidy and dust-free as the rest of the house.

“I don’t want to have any space that’s ugly,” Broker said.

She does harbor a taste for a lively palette. Just not in this house.

She saves those urges for a farmhouse that sits on 17 tree-lined acres in Magnolia, where she and Witte have horses, a miniature donkey and a huge, abundant vegetable garden. The Christmas tree inside that house has red and green ornaments, and colored lights.

“The farm is painted all colors. It definitely looks old,” Broker said. “And we have saddles and harnesses in the living room because it’s too damp to put them somewhere else.”

The warehouse compound in Independence Heights won an AIA award in 2016.

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