Lucia eames demetrios biography examples
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Llisa Demetrios discussing various Eames designs and an assemblage of contact sheets of their photos
The date was August
To Bill and me, it was just the third Wednesday of the month. When we sat down with sculptor Llisa Demetrios that morning at her home and studio in Sonoma County for an interview about her grandparents, iconic husband-and-wife designers Charles and Ray Eames, we learned it was so much more.
Llisa started off by saying, “Today’s a bittersweet day for our family. Charles died on August 21, Ray died 10 years later to the day in ”
Oh. My. Gosh. That unexpected, almost mystical overlay began two amazing hours.
Charles and Ray Eames were leaders in the revolutionary design aesthetic known as mid-century modern, developed in the post-World War II years and lasting to around Mid-century modern homes are clean and pared down, featuring horizontal lines, open floor plans, and an integration of outdoors and indoors with lots of windows and glass doors. The couple’s c
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The Institute of Infinite Curiosity
Iconic 20th-century designers Ray and Charles Eames never lived in Sonoma County.
The couple, married for almost kvartet decades, are most associated with Los Angeles. That’s where they built their famous Case Study home and ran the Eames Office, which applied their unique way of looking at the world to everything from furniture to museum exhibits to educational films.
Their classic documentary, “Powers of Ten,” created in the s for IBM, is still shown in many high-school science classes, and the supremely comfortable Eames lounge chair and ottoman anchor living spaces all over the world.
For many design fans, this is well-trod history. But the part of the story less widely known is the Eames family’s connection to Sonoma County.
In the early s, Charles’s daughter, Lucia, bought 27 acres in west Petaluma’s rural San Antonio Valley. Over a lifetime of visiting Charles and Ray at their place of work, Lucia absorbed their creative principles and be
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Charles Eames Granddaughter Is a Maker
In West Marin, a legacy of design and ideas continues.
THE CHILDREN of designers and artists often make things, and so, not surprisingly, Llisa Demetrios, 49, is a third-generation maker who seems to follow in the footsteps of her tribe.
At the acre West Marin ranch close to Petaluma where she lives and works, some of her sculptures, particularly totemic works she calls “Lunar Asparagus people,” after a Max Ernst sculpture, spring from a kind of genetic memory that was formed during frequent trips as a child to Venice, California, to visit one of the greatest modern furniture design duos of the 20th century, Charles and Ray Eames.
Eames was her grandfather, and her late mother, Lucia Eames (his only child with first wife Catherine Woermann), was also a sculptor: her two-dimensional designs were made into large laser-cut steel and bronze objects such as decorative gates. Coincidentally, before studying architecture and design, Eames bega