A Quickie (but goodie!)

I'm always thinking about different ways to display art, and in particular, ways to create interesting art displays (or showcase a collection of objects or ephemera) even if you don't have much of an art collection.

I snapped this picture in a Pottery Barn store recently.  I love the way the frames make a sort of architectural installation, and you want to go up and see the images.

The images (or objects) could be anything that forms a collection: special seashells with notes on where they were collected, postcards you send to yourself from years of travel destinations, foreign stamps, bowties, the placecards for special family members from your wedding reception.  This arrangement is all about creating emphasis on a group of things that become more special when placed together.

Installation would be simple: just choose a simple hook, buy in multiple, and add pretty ribbon, twine, or cord to to eye hooks on the back of your frames.

What do you think: if you hung a display this way, what would you put in the frames?

Small Measures

Via Design Sponge

A collection of shadowbox frames wrapping a corner take it from awkward to feature.  Simple.  Lovely!

Art You Can Make: Stamps

I mentioned a stamp project the other day.  It's not particularly innovative: there's no decoupage, or DIY, or staple guns, or mod podge, or rub n buff.  Just some cool images being used as cool images.

When I cleaned out my teen bedroom at my parents house (I managed to avoid it for 20 years because I lived away), I found some rather random treasures.  Including a little stone inlay box that fits in my palm, filled with a small collection of stamps from exotic places.  I have an excellent memory--the joke in my family is that I can tell you what I was wearing on any specific occasion--but I have absolutely no recollection of where these stamps came from, just when I collected them, or why the sudden interest.  Yet I do know, for certain, that they are mine: I remember putting them in the little oval box and worrying about crushing the corners (which I did do.)

I had been wanting a series of something for the long, plain hallway upstairs.  I even bought six Ikea ribba frames in a light wood long enough ago that I could no longer return them (and that is LONG in Ikea years.)  The hallway connects the guest room, with its two fashion watercolor illustration and other works on paper, and the girls' room, with the cut-paper silhouettes, an oil painting, and some vintage works, all paint on paper. I was thinking photography.

But I wanted something very small scale.  I like the idea of intimate works in a hallway, where you kind of have to get close to see the piece.

Enter my little stamp collection.

I went through and chose the stamps that had the simplest, most graphic presence so they would "read" at a bit of a distance, and tried to focus on pieces with colors from the two bedrooms.  I played around with different groupings, and ended up using these:

I love that they are from the 70s (how appropriate to my decor), that a number of them were special edition Olympics stamps, and that several have been canceled.

The stamps were a little TOO small on their own, and would have required special mats, which would have been pricey and/or a mat-cutting pain in the ass (so glad we bought that mat cutter, back in the day).  So I scanned the stamps.  My scanner is not exactly high resolution, so I found I was only able to blow them up a little bit: just enough to be more than a stamp.  Actually, they worked as big as 3x5 or 4x6, but they started to look like postcards, and I wanted to preserve their stamp-ness.  Stampiness?  Essence of stamp.

I printed them on heavy watercolor paper to give a bit of weight and texture, and slapped them in those Ribba frames.

I have to say, I love the way they turned out!  they are most likely temporary, but I'm so happy to have something up on that wall.  The laundry room is in the middle of the hallway, an I love catching a glimpse of these two while I fold laundry out of the dryer.

What a glamorous life I lead!

What about you: any good ephemera to scan and mount as art?

Collections

I've never been much of a collector. Or a vignetter, for that matter. As an adult, I think this has come from a combination of not enough space (a dozen years in NYC will either knock the collection right out of you or drive you to it, I think) and a practical side which understands that coffee tables are for feet, and magazines, and remote controls, and toys, and, well, coffee. Not coral fans and porcelein horses, lovely as they may be.

Yet I was stopped in my tracks by this collection of black objects in a home that recently appeared in Chicago Home and Garden. Gathered together and unified by hue, I find this so very striking.


The miss, for me, is that this was curated by a designer, and while I think they did a gorgeous job, I just can't imagine giving up this much space to things that were not personally meaningful to me.

And oh, okay, I did have two collections growing up. Vintage pins (you know, brooches) in elementary school and porcelein dolls, particularly harlequins, after that. I can't believe I am admitting this. But I need to collect the dolls from my closet at my parents house, so it's about time I confronted this collection. Literally.

What do (or did) you collect? Would you live with a collection gathered by someone else? Most importantly, if anyone was or is inspired by this or a similar collection and decides to take a can of black spraypaint to a bunch of old crap they find lying around the house, please, please send me a picture!