Artist Victoria Pierce Fricot made the corner of her dining room her studio.
You'd never know it, the way she hides it behind a black wooden screen draped in a silky pink-fringed shawl.
Her 1950s ranch-style house in Beach Park came with all the amenities most home buyers yearn for: a luxurious kitchen, spacious bathrooms, a slip of shady side yard perfect for an outdoor living area.
But no real space to speak of for her bright boxes of pastels and colored pencils and ceramic pots of paintbrushes.
So she made a studio out of an old storage closet and part of the room where she and her husband sometimes share meals.
She threw a colorful, jigsaw-shaped rubber mat on the floor and created a work area from an old folding table.
Outside the closet, in the dining room, she mats and frames her work and displays it casually for friends.
Fricot, whose "Land-Escapes" art show runs through July 26 at the Jimmie B. Keel Regional Library, is a mixed-media artist and professional photographer. She has a passion for the "Polaroid transfer" technique, which involves taking a picture and using water, heat, pen, ink and pastels to transfer the image onto special paper and embellish it. Fricot takes the basic technique a step further by combining transferred images for subtle, sometimes haunting, collages.
But her work is not confined to the indoors. An ardent gardener and a master at space planning, she created a seamless series of four outdoor rooms in her garden. She picked out old brick for the flooring, planted bamboo and hung artwork and mirrors on the fence. The rooms have no walls, but each is somehow distinct.
See a pattern?
Where Fricot's home ends and the studio begins is fuzzy. Her photos morph into collages; her outdoor garden has rooms without borders.
Fricot doesn't believe in boundaries.
And that works for her.
From her makeshift studio, she looks out into her beautiful garden. On a cool morning, she opens the window and a breeze blows in, making her feel one with the day.
In the mid 1990s, while living in Virginia, her husband of 30 years died of cancer. Devastated, she couldn't stay in the house during the hours when they used to make dinner and catch up on the day. To avoid the blues that inevitably came with twilight, she went to exercise class and took long walks, sometimes for hours.
It made her forget.
On one of those walks, she tripped and fell and broke her pelvis, hip and back.
"It was a stopping point in my life," recalls Fricot, now 55. "On that night everything changed for me."
During her long recovery, she made up her mind to focus on what was important. She decided to sell her house and move away, far away from the grief.
She had been corresponding with a man who had worked for the same company as her husband. His wife had died of cancer about the same time Fricot lost her husband.
"He's a letter writer," she says. "We both wrote back and forth to each other, just ordinary things about ordinary lives."
She finally came to visit her friend in Florida. His name is Brian Fricot.
They spent a long weekend together in Orlando. Days turned into weeks. That was in 1997.
"I never left Florida," she says.
She keeps a small album of wedding pictures snapped in an Episcopal church and on the beach.
She found bliss again, but she hasn't forgotten the time when she dreaded being home alone.
She honors that time in her life. It is rolled into the package she has become today. Just like her, pictures of ordinary things can be transformed into a collage of something else entirely.
