Remembering Richard Enzer

Remem­ber­ing Richard Enz­er — Part 1

by Susan­na Starr

Every­one has moments in their lives that seem incon­se­quen­tial at the time but, in ret­ro­spect, we can rec­og­nize the impact of that chance meet­ing or conversation.

It was an out­door par­ty held at Ellie’s house, just down the road from where I lived in the small val­ley of Valdez, just out­side of Taos, New Mex­i­co, that Richard Enz­er rode into my life. I had been stum­bling around in the woods, try­ing to get back to where most of the peo­ple were gath­ered in the open area around the house, unable to find my way through the dense veg­e­ta­tion. I was begin­ning to feel panicky.

At the moment I start­ed to emerge into the warm sun­light, Richard got down from the horse he had been rid­ing and, see­ing my face, strode over and opened his arms to hold me. There were no words exchanged, just the com­fort and secu­ri­ty offered in that reas­sur­ing embrace, one per­son to anoth­er. For me, it was a defin­ing moment and despite the var­i­ous expe­ri­ences we shared in the ensu­ing years, that ges­ture of kind­ness and recog­ni­tion remained.

We each wan­dered off in dif­fer­ent direc­tions then at the par­ty and dur­ing the fol­low­ing years. Liv­ing in a small town, I heard about him from time to time but it wasn’t until a num­ber of years lat­er that he reap­peared in my life.
High cialis from cana­da blood pres­sure and poor vas­cu­lar health are rea­sons to erec­tile dys­func­tion. At the point when via­gra store usa cgmp is wrecked the veins come back to their ordi­nary size, suc­cess­ful­ly fin­ish­ing the erec­tion. In the US alone, online via­gra in aus­tralia there are more than 30 mil­lion Amer­i­cans expe­ri­ence intense or chron­ic headaches. Some like­wise report­ed lev­i­t­ra price bought that nasal con­ges­tion being a problem. 
My part­ner and I had spent more than a dozen years build­ing a busi­ness that involved our active par­tic­i­pa­tion in a small Zapotec Indi­an weav­ing vil­lage locat­ed in the moun­tains just out­side of Oax­a­ca, Mex­i­co. As the years passed, our busi­ness grew as did that of the peo­ple we worked with. We worked sev­en days a week and spent sev­er­al months in Mex­i­co every win­ter work­ing with the weavers and build­ing what devel­oped into a small eco resort and retreat cen­ter in anoth­er part of the coun­try, the Yucatan Penin­su­la of Mexico.

Dur­ing the years of the 1980’s, we were buy­ing large quan­ti­ties of beau­ti­ful hand-loomed rugs and wall hang­ings, care­ful­ly select­ing each piece. We were receiv­ing ship­ments reg­u­lar­ly and had our own “bode­ga” or stor­age area. Here our extra inven­to­ry was care­ful­ly stacked and laid out. Ship­ments that were received at the shop were tak­en there to be unpacked, exam­ined and admired again before putting them in their prop­er places.

It was on one of these occa­sions that we were unpack­ing a ship­ment, that we real­ized the rugs were not famil­iar to us. They were stun­ning­ly beau­ti­ful in deep rich tones of com­plex designs. It didn’t take us long to real­ize that they were Richard’s rugs that had been sent to us by mistake.

Although we hadn’t been in touch with him, we knew that Richard had been work­ing in the same weav­ing vil­lage that we were, after a long absence from Taos, and design­ing his own rugs there. With the help of not­ed weaver and col­orist, Rachel Brown of Taos, New Mex­i­co, he devel­oped a palette of deep, rich col­ors more rem­i­nis­cent of fine ori­en­tal rugs than the col­ors and designs being used in the small Zapotec Indi­an village.

His expe­ri­ence work­ing with the New York rug gallery, the Gor­dian Knot, expand­ed his design hori­zons with ori­en­tal design ele­ments includ­ed in his own col­lec­tion of South­west­ern designs, which he called the Line of the Spir­it. We hadn’t ever seen any of his col­lec­tion but it was clear as we unfold­ed the pieces that day in our bode­ga, that Richard had gone far beyond any­thing being pro­duced in the vil­lage and, with good rea­son, we were very impressed.

Track­ing him down wasn’t dif­fi­cult and we sent the ship­ment on to him. Not long after, he sug­gest­ed that we look once again at some of his pieces with the idea of our pur­chas­ing them. We did and found it a per­fect addi­tion to our own fine col­lec­tion at what was then known as La Uni­ca Cosa (the only thing), now Starr Inte­ri­ors. We loved the rugs and our cus­tomers respond­ed to our enthu­si­asm and were soon buy­ing from Richard on a reg­u­lar basis.

It wasn’t very long after­ward that Richard showed up at the shop one day with his art direc­tor from the vil­lage to lay out a propo­si­tion. What came of that dis­cus­sion was the begin­ning of my long involve­ment with the Line of the Spir­it, which con­tin­ues to this day.