Still Moving In

[akirlu]

I have recently started hanging art in the bedroom after months and months of bare walls. I guess I was waiting until I figured out the perfect solution for bookshelves in there. Yeah, right. I finally recognized that in a household with Too Much Art, sooner or later you have to cut bait and hang something. Because the bedroom is yellow, I've been favoring blue art. I dunno, it makes sense to me.



The lighthouse painting was free art -- I found it next to the dumpsters when I was spending the summer living in a trailer at Irvine Meadows West. It isn't finished -- you can tell if you look carefully at the close-up, that a few bits are still bare canvas. I guess the artist got disgusted, or felt they would never finish, or ... make up your own story. I never found out who painted it, but it pleases me to have saved it from oblivion.




The hyper-impressionist pillar and landscape Hal bought from a classmate of his at Pomona, Ben Kinmont. I think it's amazing work for a twenty-something. These days he apparently only does performance art. Pity, really. He had a hell of a thing going as a painter. I like having this piece over our bed because it reads just as clearly with my glasses off as on. I think of it as the summer twilight view from a Southern porch, looking out over the trees eaten by kudzu monsters.



And yes, I have succumbed to the granny lure of plates on the walls. I just loved the color of these Spode plates and trivets, but they go far better in my bedroom than with any of the rest of my dishes. So on the wall they go, where they can put a smile on my face as I bumble my way to the closet in the morning.

Bit by bit, we move into our house. I wonder if we shall ever finish.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I just love the color combos you've put together.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I've never lived in a place with color on the walls -- discounting visits to my grandparents, who had wonderful seagrass wallpaper -- and I'm perpetually fascinated by the way the color changes depending on the weather and time of day and other lighting effects.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

If you ever get tired of the lighthouse, I'll give it a home.

I tend to buy books and yarn rather than art, but I keep looking at the same two pecunium pictures over and over again. So I'll probably do something about that one of these days, as soon as I can figure out what sizes I want.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I'll keep you in mind on the lighthouse. It's kinda crazy that it was headed for a landfill.

I don't remember a time when I wasn't collecting art in one form or another. I come from a line of arty folk, and so there's always been this attraction to surrounding myself with the work of other people, if only in postcards or reproductions. I remember some class quiz or other claiming that growing up in a house with original art on the walls was a marker of wealth or upper-class background, which to me is just crazy talk. All you really need is a few boho types in the woodpile.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Thanks! It's my Swedish Nature battling to the fore.

[saoba.livejournal.com]

This must be 'move the art around' week on LJ.

We hung some new stuff and moved some older stuff around today. We joke about needing to add a room to our house just to have the hanging space.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It would be one advantage to modernist houses with the soaring open atrium -- more space to hang art. Though that rather undermines the spare idiom that modernism tries to foster. (To which I say "feh" anyhow.)

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

I found that hanging pictures turned my place from a house to a home. Cliched, but there it is.

Mostly I hang my own pictures, but also framed things from calendars, and the occasional original Japanese print. I also have a whole wall of family photos - my father and my uncle used to develop and print their own B&W and I have therefore a lot of large prints of families that go together really well. I miss black and white - you cannot really get good B&W prints from digital yet, so I'm left with what I did before I got rid of my film camera and dismantled my darkroom.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I used to have a pair of black & white portrait prints of my grandparents that my aunt shot and developed and they got mildew-damaged between moves. I miss them -- you're right, there's nothing quite like B&W and I do rather miss it. On the other hand, we haven't given up any of the film cameras yet, so in principle I could pick it up myself.

[19-crows.livejournal.com]

These are all nice but I really like the Spode trays - the way the yellow in them matches the wall.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I'm stupidly fond of the Spode myself. I say "stupidly" because if there is one thing I do not need more of, ever, it's dishes. But when I found them I simply had to have them, so it was a damned lucky piece of serendip that they actually match the bedroom. Must. Stop. Buying. Dishes.