From the category archives:
Crawford Doyle Booksellersis one of my favorite UES spots — they sell old auction catalogs out front and I like flipping through them and seeing what catches my eye. This particular catalog was annotated with the final sale price (from the 80s).
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Beautiful! Etsy seller Dimdi sells a huge selection of watercolor animals. At $25 each they would be so sweet in a nursery. FOX Original watercolor painting 10×8 inch by dimdi on Etsy.
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Found these today while working on my thesis. I love the plaid ribbon on the women in the white dress above. Very au courant, don’t you think? I like to think that these women would have been bloggers if they’d be alive today.
Up top is James Tissot, Young Women Looking at Japanese Objects (1866). Below is Monet’s Portrait of Madame Monet (1876).
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I’ve been lusting after a Kindle recently since a couple of good friends (who also happen to be new moms) are Kindle fanatics. My father is a writer and I grew up in a house filled to the brim with books. My reservations about the Kindle are two-fold a) I don’t want another device to charge and (b) I like to see the physical books I’ve read lined up on my bookshelf. I suppose I could always buy cheap used copies of the books I read on my Kindle that I LOVED, but that seems a little nuts. It’s a pickle, this technology thing.
All of this is preamble to explain why I was delighted to see the work of Jane Mount. She paints bookshelves and will do a custom portrait of your favorite shelf at home. I love this idea and think it makes a perfect gift for the reader or writer in your life!
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A friend sent me the paintings of Marie Laurencin, a French painter working at the turn of the century. I love the soft quality to these paintings and muted colors. I’d like a bedroom like this.
PS the woman in the portrait is none other than CoCo Chanel.
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I’m in love with these – they almost look like they were done with paint sample cards. See more here.
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I love manual date stamps and when I saw this piece by Joy Drury Cox on Swiss Miss I just had to post, as I was feeling today that the summer is flying by. I hope everyone has a lovely weekend. I’m thinking of checking out the Buckminster Fuller exhibit at the Whitney today… if I wasn’t me, I wish I’d been an inventor.
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Loving this painting, “My Imagined Heartbeat” by Rebecca Urias found on the Shiny Squirrel.
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I’m up, I’m trying to motivate to pack and organize for our trip to Montana. Instead I’m drinking iced coffee (the ac is busted) and reading the blogs. [bad bad bad]. Loving this Joseph Cornell piece, navigating the imagination. Found on Diana: Muse.
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This painting, Running Before the Storm, in the collection of the MFA Boston caught my eye today while I was in the library researching — the artist is unknown, and the painting dates from the 1870s. How awesome is the thunderstorm? I used to love to sit on my porch in Vermont and watch storms roll up our valley. The children and the farmer running are almost comical (which makes the painting not quite as scary as it could be) and the horses are so dramatically black and white. Something about the enthusiasm of this painter just makes me happy.
PS: Those of you in Boston, how awesome does the 13th annual French Film Festival at the MFA look?
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I’m researching the aesthetic movement and came across this painting by William Merrit Chase, the “Portrait of Dora Wheeler.” I love the yellow and blues here, in the vase on the table, in textile in the background — beautiful!
From my reading it seems that the aesthetic movement was concerned with principles of function, simplicity (I can get behind both!) and iconography derived from nature (Japanese art and design were a huge inspiration for Aesthetic Movement artists). One of the objectives of the movement was to introduce art into the daily life of the average person and proponents really encouraged you to surround yourself with objects of beauty.
The more I read about it, the more I realize that I’m a neo-aesthetic — I look for functional, simple and beautiful objects for my home and fervently believe in the importance of beauty in everyday objects. Who is with me? Let’s start a movement together!
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Back in November I gave Tim a painting for his birthday, but it wasn’t until recently that we finally got around to having it properly framed and hung in our bedroom! I love it. It soothes me and made me realize not only how important art in a bedroom can be and also how having a piece that we absolutely love makes our nest a bit more like a home.
The painting, by the way, is by Michael Abrams, an artist from upstate New York whose work we have admired for a while. He paints ethereal aerial views of the Hudson River Valley that are simply breathtaking. From his artist statement:
Although nature forms the basis for my paintings, they are a personalized vision in which I am revisiting landscape painting within the context of contemporary art. These idealized landscapes set the stage and give the perception of something otherworldly. They exist almost entirely in the mental space of nostalgic recall. The viewer is introduced to the picture plane as if they are hovering slightly above the ground, adding to the detachment of reality. There is a dissipation of substance into atmosphere, emphasizing misty ambiance over earthly terrain. Only a hint of human presence exists, with a suggestion of roadways and distant fields.
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