 F a home says a lot about a person, Ricky Boscarino's can't
shut up. It's his agent.
Mr.
Boscarino, 42, is an artist who makes jewelry
and pottery. He lives in Sussex County, N.J., at
Luna Parc, a house with six acres of gardens
that looks like the cake left out in the rain in
Jim Webb's "MacArthur Park." The "madcap" (as Mr. Boscarino
puts it) decoration of a rural hunting cabin and
woods — his kingdom and craft studio for 14
years — also recalls Gaudí's Guëll Park in
Barcelona, which he very much admires.
Luna Parc is not only
Mr. Boscarino's home, it is his largest work and his calling card as
an artist. It has been seen near and far, in local newspapers and
guides, and nationally on HGTV's "Extreme Homes." Mr. Boscarino
belongs to that elite class of master builders who are just crazy
enough to garner wide attention, which is lucrative at that. As an
artist well publicized by his self-initiated shrine, he makes
$250,000 in a good year, $100,000 on the average. Wackiness pays.
Mr. Boscarino invites
the public twice a year. The "Chapel of the Saints" is available for
weddings. A scarlet gingerbread out-shed, it is dedicated to his
Sicilian grandfather, Giuseppe, who, according to Mr. Boscarino's
Web site, www.lunaparc.com, "witnessed a miracle." There are
postcards of Luna Parc in a rack in the dining
room, and a poster is on its way. The artist is not above wearing a
crown (he designed it, in fact) for children or photographers.
On Friday, Mr.
Boscarino, who looks like a young version of Velázquez's subject
Pope Innocent X, stood in his office during his summer open house
and studio sale, making change, answering his cellular telephone,
and directing the three volunteers helping with the tourists and
their transactions.
|
 |
Curtice Taylor
for The New York Times
The artist, Ricky
Boscarino.
|
| |
 |
Curtice Taylor for The New York Times
The kitchen, with collections of bottle caps and
bowling balls. |
|
"Twenty-four
the pair in sterling," he said, pricing a pair of earrings
shaped like an artist's easel and a paint brush. White boxes
sat on the desk, labeled, Insects; Monkeys; Coffee/Tea Cups.
Mr. Boscarino is nothing if not prolific.
"It's not easy being
me, let me tell you," he said, with enough humor to defuse the
observation without denying it.
"I'm not going near
that one," said Tuck Mortimer, swiveling in a chair. Also an artist,
he is an unpaid factotum at Luna Parc who was briefly Mr.
Boscarino's personal partner and is his best friend.
With its mixture of
quaintness and industry, Luna Parc could be the home of an
aggressively ambitious elf, someone who worked for Santa and got
tired of the arctic weather and the December deadlines. An elf who
decided he wanted a workshop of his own. ("I make the stuff, don't
I?")
To his credit (and in
his defense) Mr. Boscarino appears to be having fun.
"Ricky's such a trip,"
said Frances Naftal, a visitor trying on a pair of earrings. Ms.
Naftal owns the farm next door to Luna Parc. She lowered her voice
to a whisper.
"Everything he does is creative," she said. Rain streaked the
windows like a ceramic glaze. "You haven't seen this place when the
sun's out. I mean, it's a happening," Ms. Naftal whispered
again.
"It makes you think," she said.
Mr. Boscarino, who surprised even his real estate agent when he
expressed interest in the nondescript house in 1989 (he purchased it
for $90,000), didn't renovate extensively. He knocked a
Chinese-style moon-gate window into the facade; painted the exterior
vivid colors like yellow and blue; transformed the interior with his
collections of just about everything, including bottle caps,
snowshoes and Buddhas; and planted the lawns with his sculptures,
many wired as lamps, early-amusement-park style.
"There was only one neighbor who was upset when I started, but
they've since moved," Mr. Boscarino said. Asked if he might have
been part of their decision, he said: "I don't know. I hope so."
Mr. Boscarino next built a jewelry studio, adding a pottery
studio last year. In 2000, he completed a five-year bathroom
addition that includes
four stained-glass windows depicting the
journey of life from birth (spermatozoa) to death (skeleton); a
urinal; a bidet; a Philco cabinet radio; and a whirlpool tub with a
water spout that looks like a creature from Jules Verne. The shower
is beneath a plastic dome, which, viewed from the outside, is a
cupola with three cherubs.
"I come from a long line of pack rats and putterers," Mr.
Boscarino said. "All the old Italian men, both my grandfathers and
my uncle, were furniture makers, cabinet makers, always collecting,
building, installing contraptions in the basement." Mr. Boscarino,
who has two sisters, older and younger, who are also artists, is
Italian on his mother's side, Sicilian on his father's.
"They make the distinction," he said.
The property's name, Luna Parc, is taken from an amusement park
outside Rome, where Mr. Boscarino, as a student at the Rhode Island
School of Design, spent a year.
Development continues. A "ballroom/museum," which will expand and
replace Mr. Boscarino's small sitting room, now centered on a
wood-burning stove, is the next phase. In preparation, he is
assembling materials like empty bottles, sorted by color in
supermarket carts that dot the immediate yard. They will be used as
ornament, intact or broken for mosaic work.
"Ricky puts out the word," said Ms. Naftal, walking the winding
path from studio to house, as the trees shivered with rain. " `I
need blue glass.' "
Mr. Boscarino and Mr. Mortimer have a standing order at tile
shops for discontinued or discarded tiles, which are arranged, in a
random shuffle, on floors and walls, as they are in the the new
pottery studio.
An Eiffel Tower of sporting trophies, wired together to form what
will become itself a giant trophy, was started last month.
Mr. Boscarino, with his parents, sisters and friends like Mr.
Mortimer, has been his own crew on most projects. Only the capacious
toon-terrazzo bathroom, Mr. Boscarino's Sistine cistern, tried his
patience as a homeowner or an artist.
"I've kind of created a monster," he said. "Now I'm obsessed with
the concept of constantly building. When I'm not building, I feel
like I'm slacking."
Mr. Boscarino likes to imagine Luna Parc as an educational
center, and his life as an artist with something concrete to show
for his efforts, as something of an education. School groups and
crafts classes take field trips to the site, which entertained 600
people at Mr. Boscarino's previous open house.
"I think it's important for kids who are headed toward the arts
to understand that there's a way to live your art, and make a
living," he said. "Even if you're not going to be an artist, there's
a way to live creatively."
After putting it up, Mr. Boscarino has never taken anything down,
or deacquisitioned an object from his collections, which he started
as a teenager when his mother, a veteran thrift store shopper and
flea marketer, swept the house clean in the 1970's for new and
modern furnishings.
"That's the point at which I got zealous about never throwing
things away," he said. If it was a traumatic reaction, Mr.
Boscarino, who is as even-keeled as a flat-bottomed boat on a
pleasure-grounds pond, has shelved it somewhere between the specimen
bugs and the Pooh Bear bookends.
Mr. Boscarino said that he was getting more serious as a
collector, though.
"I used to collect kitsch, now it's more handmade, pottery and
glass," he explained. He owns a vase thrown by
Beatrice Wood, the
California potter recognized as a seminal figure in the American
studio craft movement of the 20th century. Mr. Boscarino visited Ms.
Wood at her home in Ojai in 1994. Ms. Wood died in 1998.
"I told her I wanted to be just like her when I grew up," he
said. Ms. Wood had just turned 101. "She attributed her longevity to
chocolate and young men."
Mr. Boscarino hopes to retire as a potter when his success with
jewelry has made him secure. He sleeps eight hours and "creates
during the rest," said Mr. Mortimer, 33, a compact man with a goatee
who has the gingerly tendered devotion of a rescued stray. Mr.
Boscarino also worries about parking and buses, as Luna Parc's
reputation snowballs down its country road.
But reality doesn't slow entrepreneurs down.
"One of my goals is to live to 100," Mr. Boscarino said, in
emulation of Ms. Wood.
He smiled like a magician with an audience member at the crux of
his trick. Luna Parc glowed, stage lighted, in the twilight.
"I'm planning on it," he said. "I've got a lot to do."
|
