L. John Harris: The Man Who Lives in Decades of Obsession
When I first visited Villa Maybeck, L. John Harris’s 100-year-old home in Berkeley, I felt as though I had stepped into the mind of an artist. The house, an Italian-style villa in the North Berkeley hills, beautifully designed and sited by the architect, Bernard Maybeck, is a blend of rustic charm, Renaissance elegance, and intellectual playfulness. Books lie next to paintbrushes, and sculptures casually inhabit the same space as kitchen tools. John showed me his “Cabinet of Curiosities” which holds four generations of Harris family memorabilia. There are rare artifacts, hand-carved pipes (by John), vintage garlic presses, childhood toys, sketches, odd trinkets, and in a neighboring cabinet, several guitars from the Harris Guitar Collection at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, that seem like lifelong companions. My personal favorite among John’s objets d’art: a rare, signed edition of Salvador Dali’s Alice in Wonderland, a gift from his mother. Published by New York’s Maecenas Press-Random House in 1969 and distributed as their book of the month, the volume became one of the most sought-after Dalí suites of all time. It contains 12 heliogravures — one for each chapter — and an original signed etching in four colors as the frontispiece.
John’s life can be mapped by the decades he has dedicated to his obsessions. “I spend about ten years passionately following a topic,” he told me. There was the decade of Garlic (the 1970s), when he immersed himself in the pungent world of the “Stinking Rose” (his bestseller The Book of Garlic just celebrated its 50th year since publication). Then came the forty cookbooks published by his company, Aris Books (1980s). Then guitars in the 1990s — ten years of music, collecting, and storytelling that included a documentary about the Los Romeros family, a Spanish clan of world-renowned guitarists whose on-going legacy of music and artistry spoke to his soul. From there, he moved on to drawing and painting in the 2000s, followed by a memoir — Portrait in Red: A Paris Obsession — about his fascination with an anonymous and unfinished painting found in Paris in 2015 that became his muse.
I had the privilege of hosting John at the SAP Academy for Engineering, where he talked about his new book. He spoke of Aesthetic Arrest — that rare, almost sacred moment when a work of art stops you in your tracks both visually and viscerally — and about the Power of Shared Obsession — that art is not a one-way communication from artist to a passive viewer. “The artist pours in their passion,” he said, “but unless the viewer meets them halfway, the art remains silent.” Art breathes only when we breathe with it.
John’s description of how “beauty can remain unfinished and unfolding, as it continues to become” is a reminder that something incomplete can be alive, inviting us to participate in its evolution. Speaking of the creative process, he said, “When you are in the flow state, you lose yourself, you lose conscious control.” And in that lost state, unexpected discoveries are made. Creativity, for John, is a product of the body as well as the mind. “For a painter, creating is a deeply physical experience,” he told us. “Your hands lead you to places your conscious mind could never go.”
One of the striking phrases he used is a chapter title in his book: “Aura’s Cousin: Patina.” However perfect the copy of an artwork (in a book, on a computer screen) it lacks the “aura” of the original, which holds time, touch, and history. It carries, also, a “patina” that draws us in to its physical presense and makes the encounter unforgettable.
And then, of course, there is the painting featured in John’s book that he titled “The Girl in Red.” Found abandoned in a pile of discards on a Paris sidewalk, it portrays a girl with a red head scarf, her gaze both quiet and insistent. The book he has written about it is not about owning the painting but about honoring it and its mysterious origins.
At Villa Maybeck John gifted me copies of all his books including the inaugural issue of Garlic Times, his garlic fan club newsletter from 1977. As I left, I thought about the unfinished drawings on his table, the guitars leaning against their stands, the Cabinet of Curiosities waiting to be opened again. John’s life is a philosophy: to live fully, you must be willing to lose yourself, again and again, in what you love.
