Artful life.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

For artists Tenold and Karen Peterson, a life in art has become synonymous with the art of living.

For three decades they have lived and reared children and made fine art on rural acreage near Junction City, designing and building in the process a craftsman-style house that's a showcase for Tenold's stained glass and welded steel sculpture and Karen's weaving.

But they have also made an art of rural living, enjoying fine food that they raise themselves in a garden that's equally beautiful and bountiful.

They heat largely with wood. They don't own a television set. And they raise and slaughter their own sheep, pigeons and rabbits.

But they also enjoy material goods, such as a pair of antique Jaguars that Tenold has restored.

The Petersons are a rarity. They are a grown-up success story - he's now 68 and she's 65 - from the back-to-the-land movement of the '60s and '70s.

The couple moved to Oregon from Southern California in the early 1970s. Tenold was teaching art in San Diego. Karen was his student.

Tenold had been to Lane County to visit an artist friend in 1972 and ended up buying undeveloped rural property.

``I decided it would be really great to have a place here to camp out,'' he said. ``Land was really cheap. There was an ad for six acres, $1,000 an acre.''

He bought it a few days later.

``It had that wonderful mixture of forest, some pasture land, and above all the creek running though it. For a Southern California desert rat, that creek meant everything to me.''

Then he met Karen, one of his students at San Diego State College, and they began camping on the property.

The 1970s back-to-the-land movement was in full swing. Their bible was The Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand's compendium of practical (or sometimes just hopeful) advice for would-be homesteaders.

The couple began spending more and more time here. They would drive up for Thanksgiving, driving two days on the road to and from California to spend two days in the woods. They built a pole building that served as a storage shed. They began to dream about the future.

Finally in 1974 he took two years off work and they lived on the property full time, jumping into such arcane projects as water witching (they swear they independently dowsed the property and located well sites within a foot of each other) and raising rabbits and pigs.

They were total beginners, city kids trying to get a handle on rural living.

"My first event slaughtering a rabbit almost turned me away from it," Tenold said. "I did what you're supposed to do - and it didn't kill it. There was the rabbit screaming, and me and the rabbit were down there in the dirt ...''

A far worse fate befell the windmill project. The couple decided they could live "off the grid" by putting in their own windmill near a well uphill from their house. So they bought a windmill and a 14,000-gallon wooden vat, which had been used to make maraschino cherries, and hauled everything up the hill on their backs. They had friends over for a windmill raising party.

The breeze picked up, the blades turned around - and the windmill pumped absolutely no water. There was never enough wind there in the forest, the windmill blades were the wrong size, the well was too deep - whatever the cause, the whole project never worked.

Untouched since then, the windmill collapsed a few years ago.

``We mourned it like a loss in the family,'' Karen says.

To make matters worse, they discovered - after installing an electric pump on the well - that the wooden vat was saturated with toxic chemicals and quickly killed goldfish they put in the water to control mosquitoes.

``You didn't want to drink that water,'' she says. ``That was a major failure.''

Their house, on the other hand, is a spectacular success.

From the time they started camping on the land, Tenold and Karen were planning that house. They would spend their time in Southern California dreaming up ideas and building architectural models.

The house is built in three separate components: studio space that occupies the old storage building, a bath house with clawfoot tub and its own wood-burning stove, and the house itself, which sprawls up a steep hillside.

Living in three separate buildings forces them to go outside even on the worst days of winter - and that was part of the plan.

The kitchen has a red brick floor and a drain, like a restaurant kitchen, so it can be hosed down. A functioning wood cook stove, with a couple of electric burners to one side, does the cooking.

A glass-ceilinged room high up in the multi-story house was originally designed as a greenhouse, until they realized it was too difficult to haul soil and plants up and down stairs all the time. Now it's a dazzling sun porch, next to which Tenold plans an even higher crow's nest outside on the roof.

The house is inspired, at least in part, by the Greene brothers, Charles and Henry, who built Arts and Crafts-style bungalows with ample light and fresh air in Southern California at the turn of the 20th century.

``We went through a lot of those houses there and loved them,'' Tenold says.

Both Tenold and Karen are serious foodies. A patron of Tenold's introduced them to chefs James Beard, the Oregon native who would go on to found a cooking school in New York, and Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley and the inventor of California cuisine. Both have enjoyed the Petersons' cooking, and Waters has been a guest at the Petersons' home.

The couple have no illusions about opening their own restaurant.

``We care too much about each other ever to do that,'' Tenold said.

``Well, we have fantasized about it,'' she said. ``It would be fun to decorate the restaurant.''

``But to work in it every night?'' he replied.