Personal Note: The gallery reopens!
So I finished painting my hallway today, a project I'd been putting off for eight years. I'd gotten the trim half-done before I had a contractor in to rip up the (disintegrating, ew) carpet and replace it with Pergo and then just let the space sit, baseboards in one color to match the living room and door molding in (mostly) another. This time I bought a couple of cans of decorator's white and did the whole thing in bland. I'm too busy writing to play interior designer.
But this project meant that, in addition to unscrewing doors and covering the edges of the floor and ceiling in painter's tape, I had to take down all the pictures and such. And then I realized that, hey, I didn't have to use the holes the previous owner had made to hang my stuff -- I could make new holes. And hang more stuff. So I did. The hallway is now my art gallery: I have a print by Janice J. Hanson, a landscape photograph by Melinda Hall, and a watercolor by Ginny Masters, all local artists. I'm still trying to figure out where to hang the reproduction of an illuminated "Obsecro te" from a Book of Hours that a friend gave me for Christmas a few years ago, but the Norman Rockwell and Days of Christmas plates are back above the guest room and bathroom doors, where they belong.
Then it occurred to me that, apart from my grandfather's seascapes, almost every piece of real art I own was created by a woman. I have a seascape by Carol Haese in acrylics that I inherited from an aunt and another in watercolors by Bettie J. Fahs that I bought myself. I have another of Melinda Hall's photographs, a sunflower garden. I have Ultra Magnus in a kilt by my goddaughter and an elaborately cross-stitched "Peace" sign by her mother, as well as pottery from every woman in the family (and the dad, too). I also have a few cross-stitch projects of my own hanging up, as well as two artsy landscape photographs I took and thought were good enough to frame. There are a few anonymous pieces as well: a still life on a board signed "Tomar," a foggy watercolor landscape from my hometown signed "Fultz," and an unsigned picture of two roosters in a bush from Mexico. Beside all this, the number of works by indisputably male artists -- that one pot, a Michael Podesta print and a marquetry seascape by Robert Johnson -- is paltry. I didn't do it on purpose, so I guess women's art must speak to me in a way that men's doesn't.
I also appear to have a thing for seascapes, but I knew that. I've told my parents that they need to earmark the rest of my grandfather's paintings -- especially the Chinese junk and the rocky shore -- for me in their will. My brother can have the Waterford crystal and the cranberry glass instead.
But this project meant that, in addition to unscrewing doors and covering the edges of the floor and ceiling in painter's tape, I had to take down all the pictures and such. And then I realized that, hey, I didn't have to use the holes the previous owner had made to hang my stuff -- I could make new holes. And hang more stuff. So I did. The hallway is now my art gallery: I have a print by Janice J. Hanson, a landscape photograph by Melinda Hall, and a watercolor by Ginny Masters, all local artists. I'm still trying to figure out where to hang the reproduction of an illuminated "Obsecro te" from a Book of Hours that a friend gave me for Christmas a few years ago, but the Norman Rockwell and Days of Christmas plates are back above the guest room and bathroom doors, where they belong.
Then it occurred to me that, apart from my grandfather's seascapes, almost every piece of real art I own was created by a woman. I have a seascape by Carol Haese in acrylics that I inherited from an aunt and another in watercolors by Bettie J. Fahs that I bought myself. I have another of Melinda Hall's photographs, a sunflower garden. I have Ultra Magnus in a kilt by my goddaughter and an elaborately cross-stitched "Peace" sign by her mother, as well as pottery from every woman in the family (and the dad, too). I also have a few cross-stitch projects of my own hanging up, as well as two artsy landscape photographs I took and thought were good enough to frame. There are a few anonymous pieces as well: a still life on a board signed "Tomar," a foggy watercolor landscape from my hometown signed "Fultz," and an unsigned picture of two roosters in a bush from Mexico. Beside all this, the number of works by indisputably male artists -- that one pot, a Michael Podesta print and a marquetry seascape by Robert Johnson -- is paltry. I didn't do it on purpose, so I guess women's art must speak to me in a way that men's doesn't.
I also appear to have a thing for seascapes, but I knew that. I've told my parents that they need to earmark the rest of my grandfather's paintings -- especially the Chinese junk and the rocky shore -- for me in their will. My brother can have the Waterford crystal and the cranberry glass instead.