The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 139

Henrietta Berk's Paintings Set a Decorating Theme Artist Berk "sits" jor photo in her studio Gold and orange tones in Mrs. Berk's impressionistic landscape in breakfast room are picked up in place mats, napkins, glasses PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN GORMAN I I IV Home in Oakland by Phyllis Seidkin An artist has a definite edge over those of us who must buy rather than paint our pictures. His or her home can be a place alive with color and vibrant shapes its mood inexpensively and skillfully altered by the change of a canvas. Henrietta Berk's Oakland hillside home is such a place. It is brilliant with her portraits and "big, squishy landscapes," many of which have hung in museums and galleries here, in Boston and Seattle.

Every room in the Berks gracious, three-level, Monterey style home displays not only her canvases but a decorative know-how that any homemaker might envy. The dining room in particular serves as a "little gallery." Here the walls are painted matte white; the oak plank floor is left uncarpeted and polished to a glistening sheen. When planning a dinner party, Mrs. Berk chooses one painting or a group of them from her studio and uses the colors in the canvas as the basis of her table arrangement. In the picture at the right, for instance, she picked up the vivid reds in the three paintings seen in the straw flowers in the long-throated chianti bottles, in the table runner, in the candles in the antique candelabra on the cabinet at the rear.

By hanging some of her more subdued paintings and changing the table linen and glassware, she easily achieves a different effect. Many of the interesting accessory pieces that enhance her home's interior are inexpensive but carefully selected items baskets, sculptures, lacquer plates used to best artistic advantage. art" -V pSv Henrietta Berk calls her dining room "the gallery," keynotes her dinner decorating theme to the colors in oils she hangs 9 The San Francisco Examiner PICTORIAL LIVING March 1, 1964.