Now that another Valentine's Day has arrived I wanted to write about people in the arts who marry others who are also in the arts.

It was in 1971 when I really started to think about this. The summer of '71 found me in upstate New York for three weeks at a summer program for painters and pottery artists. Being one of seven male art students and surrounded by around 55 female art students had me thinking how great the art world was!

A day trip to Ottawa that I posted about last summer included my picking up the upcoming National Arts Centre Orchestra season schedule as shown below. I loved the graphics of the printed schedule and added it to my collection of 'good design' when I returned home.

The '71-'72 National Arts Centre Orchestra concert schedule. One day in September while riding home from high school on the bus I showed this schedule to my friend, April, and was surprised by how many of the musicians she had seen in concert. In a funny coincidence, she and I would both meet one of the musicians shown below, Jean-Pierre Rampal, at a small concert in 1983 in my town in upstate New York.

I heard while at camp that my neighbors had a student from the west coast staying with them for the summer. My neighbor was Julius Baker who was the principal flutist for several decades with the New York Philharmonic and also a teacher at Juilliard.

After I returned home from the camp they asked me if I could make a large drawing of their house and I said I'd be happy to. I saw the visiting student briefly the afternoon that I sketched the house and never saw her again during the summer. On the first day of high school in September I was really surprised to see her get on my bus and it turned out she had decided to stay on the east coast. She was in my homeroom and nearly all of my classes throughout the day. She joined the high school band and was the best flutist of the group.

My neighbor, Julius Baker, in a photo I took in 1984 when the Philharmonic played at Ives Concert Park in CT:

 My friend, April, as seen in a book I made of super large halftone photos:

After about six weeks of high school my new friend, April, decided she was heading back to the west coast.

Long story, short...after being penpals for more than a year I could envision getting married to my friend as we seemed to have such a wonderful rapport and common interests. Unfortunately, she never came east in a year's time to attend Juilliard and ultimately stayed on the west coast, but the experience had me thinking that the person I eventually would be married to most likely would be a creative type.

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While I know so many people in design and the arts who are married to a spouse in the same or similar field, I had problems finding stories in print about this. Typing in words like "creative couples" mostly yielded stories about how to add creativity to your marriage.

One story I tracked down spoke about architects who marry each other and that was from 2006 in The New York Times:

Like partners in any other architecture firm, married couples design together, make business decisions together, meet with developers as a team and travel to building sites in tandem. Interviews with some couples suggest that it can be tricky. There are the perceptions of the outside world to contend with: the idea that men are muscular masters of tectonics, and women, glorified interior decorators. There are the strains of heavy travel and long days while working and living together, and the potential for design arguments to escalate into marital power struggles.

But on the whole, married architects suggested, the married relationship is a plus for the architecture, allowing for an unsparing candor that takes the work to a higher level.

“We rely on critiquing each other to death, a kind of Ping-Pong,” said Ms. Andraos, who founded Work Architecture with Mr. Wood in 2002. “When we agree, we know that it’s good.”

--Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times

Click on the image for the article:

A more recent story appeared in Imprint and was republished in Salon about Charles and Ray Eames, the famous designers, and a couple I remember talking at length about while in art school with my friend, Joanie, who was totally impressed by the Eames and their work:

The point of talking about that story would be to say that Charles was extremely ambitious and maybe a little bit cutthroat in his career. I do think that it was important to him to build a strong brand. The way that he used the image of them as a couple to publicize and self-promote was far thinking. I think that he and Ray intuited that when you are selling a mass-produced item like a chair or an iPod, it’s not quite enough to have something that is beautiful, works well and at the right price point. It helps when you can buy a tiny piece of the designer as well. Just like Steve Jobs did that with Apple, Ray and Charles did that with their furniture. When you were buying a piece of Eames furniture, you were buying a little bit of that joie de vivre, the free and easy California lifestyle, that Charles and Ray represented to a generation of people.”

--Charlotte West, Imprint, as republished in Salon.com

Click on the image for the article:

I can tell you that marrying someone in the same field is no recipe for a long marriage. I have several friends I have known since the '70s who married other designers and eventually split up. But, I know many more who have been married for several decades at this point and the relationships are still strong.

In my own case, I married a creative type and have never regretted it. Being able to talk shop and bounce ideas off one another on a daily basis is a great feeling, along with all of the other things that go into married life!

In honor of Valentine's Day and creative and non-creative people everywhere I leave off with one of the great love songs of The Beatles. The lyrics go: "She was just 17"...that was my age and that of my friend, April, back in the fall of '71.

Text and the two friends' photos are © 2012 by B+Co., Inc.