I am an art hoarder, and it’s becoming a problem. I literally have racks and stacks of original paintings, antique prints, vintage posters — I love it all as long as it’s good. I tell myself I NEED it because I have acres of pale, lonely sheetrock that must be filled. Nature abhors a vacuum, right? Art to the rescue.

As many of you know, I did time in art school so I am kind of a picky snob about what goes on my walls. I’m not above quirky vintage charm, but if I’m hanging contemporary art it has to be on point… yet cheap. I’m not exactly Saatchi and Saatchi, displaying my Damien Hirsts alongside my Cy Twomblys. Enter Society 6, 20×200‘s cheaper (and still operating? wtf?!) cousin.

I’m not gonna lie… a lot of the art on Society 6 is just cheesy digital stuff with words on it. Sorry, guys. I’m not saying you can’t make art with Adobe Illustrator, but it’s not easy — definitely not as easy as the sheer volume of digital art would indicate.

When I’m buying prints from places like Society 6 I try to buy things that were originally created as two dimensional works designed to be reproduced, and that usually means photographs. Or in the case of Beth Hoeckel, collages created from photos.

This one is maybe a litte homage to John Baldessari. AMAZING in a girl’s room.

I’m thinking about buying this for our bedroom. Kind of a cross between Richard Hamilton and bauhaus collage.

I would kill to see this in a super refined space. The colors are amazing and it could totally be a room maker.

I am devastated this only comes in 17″ square, because I have a client who needs this to be 40×40… I may even email the artist to request another size.

I’ve ordered prints from Society 6 before and was pleasantly surprised at the print quality. Everything is on heavyweight matte (almost watercolor) paper and the inks are fairly saturated.

The prints are open edition, so these aren’t investments the way 20×200′s signed editions are. However, if you need cheap awesome art for your wall, here it is.

All art by Beth Hoeckel. Buy it here.

Also:

Tune in next week for an AMAZING wallpaper giveaway! Like, a ton of wallpaper.

It’s going to be supercallafragelisticexbealladocious good.

Happy weekend and stuff.

Ebay. It is the mother. The life giver. The font of greatness.

At least I think so.

Today I straddle the line between insanity and genius. You may decide I have jumped the shark, what with my bad iphone picture posts and now this. I say you may be right. I may be crazy. But it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for. Turn out the light…

Don’t try to save me.

So the other day I was cruising one of my favorite antique/thrift shops Uncommon Objects and this peeped out from behind the rabble, and by rabble I mean piles of lampshade forms, taxidermied hooves and dusty crocheted blankets. Who buys that crap? Anyway, obviously it caught my eye because it’s NEON and AWESOME. And it was only $49.

For some reason (poverty) I didn’t buy it and I’ve been sad ever since. Enter ebay. Same poster, $19.

They had this one, too.

Now I am kind of a snob about art. I try to only buy original stuff, but I’ve been known to buy vintage posters now and then. I really like how heavy and good these looked in person. Nice paper stock, tight line quality, super saturated colors.

These are so crazy… I imagine them in an all white room with fantastic molding. Here and here.

I am obsessed with this, but it’s $120. Still cheap, but not dirt cheap. It would look fabulous in my entry way, though.

I don’t know. I just couldn’t help myself. I love cats.

This is would shine like a star (duh) in a light cool colored room.

Hand screened. Big. Well under $100. Amazing colors.

There are a lot of ridiculous tweety bird penis booby posters out there, I can’t lie. But there are some real gems, too.

If you buy one, please skip the blacklight unless you are 19 and need some ambiance to go with your acid and Meat Beat Manifesto.

Not that I would know anything about all that.

In other news, sorry I haven’t posted any big awesome house tours or rug buying guides yet. The babes have been so sick it’s dumb and I have to type most of my posts one handed.

Hopefully on to bigger and better things next week.

Until then,

Peace. Love. Other trippy stuff.

I’ve decided that 873 kitchen posts in a row might be one too many, so let me tell you about my latest obsession: Scowters. Scowters is a flash sale of epic vintage proportions that takes place Thursdays at 8pm on facebook. I know! Basically every week at 8pm my left hand has been glued to the phone while the right feeds babies, but hopefully you will enjoy funner things while facebooking — like drinking five or six glasses of wine in between the oohs and ahhhs said flash sale will most certainly elicit. It sure beats reading 99% of the posts on facebook, because WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?

Anyhow, look what I scored at last Thursday’s sale:

Well, this is the painting my screenprint was created from. Here’s my new print in all its framed glory:

Now, I am a cheap bastard. I hem and haw over $8 hand painted Chinese vases, but I will buy art all day long. It’s so rare that I regret buying art, because it invariably finds a home. And art makes me happy when I look at it. I can’t say the same for lots of other stuff I buy — stuff that accumulates like drifts of crap in closets and the garage.

That’s not to say I’m a baller… I’m still cheap. But $140 (including shipping!) for a framed, signed 40″ wide piece of art was enough for me to type SOLD during the sale. I admit that I get cappy when I’m excited.

Plus that picture makes me feel like this:

Margot Tenenbaum and Scalamandre wallpaper… two of my favorite things.

I am really liking this dude Mark Sabin‘s work. Check it.

I’d never heard of this artist before the Scowters sale, so hey — I learned something new. And I supported small business.

You should support small business, too. The dealers who sell at Scowters are folks just like you and me, except way cooler and with better taste. You can learn yourself all about them right here.

I have to put in a plug for two of my favorite dealers, Christian May of Maison 21 and Susie Q of Minty fame. Two lovelier people you will not meet. Also they shop way too much so they have great stuff to sell.

All you have to do to join the party is like the Scowters facebook page and tune in to the sale at 8pm on Thursday nights. If something strikes your fancy, be the first to type SOLD in the comments. Prices are good for three days, so you can even waffle if you must. Easy Peasy. But hands off the amazing jewelry… that be mine.

Now, where shall I put my new print? I’m kinda thinking over the bed?

I bought it on Valentine’s Day, so that seems appropriate.

Another location contender is in the hallway over my fancy ass wallpaper that I am scared to breathe on…

You just might be able to see a glimpse of that wallpaper tomorrow because I am posting a room tour. Finally!

You will come back tomorrow, right? I probably won’t even discuss the kitchen.

[SCOWTERS]

Happy Friday, dudes.

I’ll be spending the weekend making sow’s ears into silk purses (I hope).

Anyone have any fancy plans I can enjoy vicariously?

[pinterest]

via

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Yep.  Still feelin it.

Ok, I know that usually this is an interiors blog where we enjoy the best and brightest of interior porn.  BUT, technically, since the blog is called design crisis, sometimes we dabble in other arenas, fancying ourselves worldly enough to talk about such things as art and graphics and music.  Well, today I’m pretty sure we have our first ever fashion related post and I bring this to you not because I know (or care) a thing about fashion but because the product presentation in this campaign is BEYOND WORDS.  It’s Dadaism meets Robert Palmer meets Pop Art meets Bear Grylls.  So, to say the least, it’s totally rocking my face off.  Shall we?

Ka-Pow!  I was having a hard time deciding which image to start with, but I figured egg on the head was as good as any.  Oh, also there are earrings in this image and they are by Alexis Bittar.  More More More!

There are a lot of animals happening here, which you know sends my heart racing 6-ways-to-sunday.  Is there anything better than a cat photoshopped to do something human?  Or, say, a zebra wearing a couch for a hat?  I didn’t think so.

That concludes the animal portion of our program.  But wait!  There’s more!

So awesome

I am so tired my eyes are crossed and weepy and twice I have put my underwear on inside out without noticing until the end of the day. Would that I could magically transform my puffy eyes into glory goggles capable of magnificent hallucinatory visions, kind of like this:

I’m not sure how hotshot photographer and art director Charles Bergquist is making these amazing images, but I need to know more.

There is some nutty metaphysical parallel universe bizness going on here, and it is blowing my mind up.

As if it needed any more blowing right now.

Check out more work from Charles Bergquist and buy his prints here.

There is nothing sweeter than an interesting room seen through the eyes of a fantastic photographer. Ok, perhaps world peace, equal rights, and true love might give a pretty picture a run for its money — but not much else. So it is with much whiz bang shazam that I present the work of Vincent Leroux, whose photographs strike a perfect balance between edgy and sophisticated, all seen through the glory of natural and ambient light. Overdone photography is the devil’s work. Thanks the lords of the internets for showering us with some good stuff.

Later, y’alluns. Gotta go run errands before it gets face meltingly hot.

Did you ever wet a piece of paper and hold a marker to the surface, watching the ink slowly spread into its outermost fibers? That’s pretty much the closest I ever got to water color painting. I still look at water color images in much the same way — checking out the edges, tracing the outline of the pigments’ run for the border. So today is my homage to the glorious transparency of water. And color. Hopefully I can make it through this post before jumping the backyard fence and rushing the neighbor’s pool.

Abracadabra, homies. How do you like that magic?

Have a good one!

[Emily Henderson, Black Crow Studios via Head Over Heels, Met Home, Helen Frankenthaler in her studio, Eye Spy, Ike's room]

I confess to more than a little snobbery when I was in art school. I wasn’t a snob about status or money, because those things seemed far too pedestrian to me. I was a snob about work. I was immensely impressed by craft and labor. This is not to say that I didn’t appreciate conceptualism, because I absolutely did. I just expected to see it — to have some tangible proof of the time and suffering inherent in the birth of an idea.

I was a naive idiot, and is there anything worse than a stupid snob?

I scoffed at Cy Twombly’s work (all those dots and scribbles — I could make that in my sleep!). But if I am honest with myself, I didn’t like his work because I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t discern any method to his art or craft whatsoever.

It’s been eight years since I finished school, and the art world was different back then. Art was about something — your gender, your home, your race, your pet chickens. What didn’t really matter, but there damn well better be a metaphorical SOMETHING in there somewhere.

And so, as a young photographer I was quite sure Twombly’s work was outdated, superficial, and self absorbed.

After all, photography in the late twentieth century threatened old school gestural painters like Twombly much in the same way photography threatened painting back in the early nineteenth century, leading Paul Delaroche to utter most famously, “Painting is dead.”

And after all, Cy Twombly lived in relative obscurity for decades — a recluse doing his own thing off the coast of Italy. An irrelevant person of little interest. At least that’s what I thought.

So it’s really rather funny that Twombly is undeniably popular now; it’s funny that it has become such a fad to scribble all over a canvas and call it Art with a capital A.

But the difference between Twombly and all the trendsters, the thing that I did not understand about his work when I was in school, the thing that perhaps most people were too jaded and eager to dismiss about him when he first started painting amidst all the splashy ab ex guys and minimalists years and years ago, is intent. Or INTENT, rather. Yes, with capital letters. Purpose is the key.

And to make that appear effortless is the mark of a virtuoso.

If you doubt that, read his own words regarding his work: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.”

Spoken like a man well versed in the wisdom of the classics. I hope it’s not too late for me to learn to follow suit.

Rest in peace Cy Twombly.

[NY Times Arts Beat, Photos of Cy Twombly's studio by Francois Halard]

It’s official.  I can completely and totally stop perusing the internet for any more art or design.  It’s all over.  My mind has been blown and there’s no topping it or going back.

Are you sitting down?  Seriously.  Get ready for me to tell you what’s happening here:

So, here’s the deal:  Cuban photographer Abelardo Morell creates these images ON WALLS via a little process you may have heard of called camera obscura.  Ok ok, backing up:  Morell blacks out the windows of rooms then cuts a small hole in the fabric he’s used to shut out all the light.  That pinhole is used to expose the window’s view onto the opposing wall.  He then takes a picture of the projection using a large format camera.  The film often takes up to 10 hours to expose.  Yeah.  It’s bananas.  I don’t even know if people say that anymore but I feel it’s appropriate here.

Ok.  So I might maybe not shut down the blog tomorrow, but it’s going to be a long long time before I stumble upon something this mind-blowingly good again.

UM, PS. How amazing are the views from each of those rooms, by the way?

If you missed Part 1 of this giant juggernaut of a post, feel free to check it out here. But like any good soap opera, this post works just fine if you haven’t seen the previous episodes. New York, I miss you so much. Let’s talk about all the silly little idiosyncrasies that make me want to start spreading the news.

1) Babe vs dude, and a little shop called Meg.

I’m not exactly sure what all this gender business amounts to (or if it matters at all), but Austin is apparently a “dude” town and New York is a “babe” town. I felt instantly transported away from dudedom when we stepped into Meg, a little boutique on the lower east side. Maria (only the cutest shop girl ever) treated us like her besties — mainly by referring to us as “babe” about 150 times within the span of 20 minutes. I wanted to pack her up in my suitcase and take her home with me so we could play dress up forever and ever.

2) I love Central Park.

Is it cheesy for me to say that? Frankly, I don’t give a damn. I think the existence of Central Park — an entire mini forest preserved amongst the most expensive real estate in the world — speaks to the goodness of humankind. The end.

3) New York, your food confuses me.

So we went to The Hurricane Club for drinks and dinner, and despite the lovely ambiance (which was much swankier at night) the food was very underwhelming. And I think something must be wrong with me, because I felt that way about much of the food in NY.

Sorry about the ugly camera phone picture, but this is my breakfast at Friend of a Farmer. I was super excited about being served in a mini cast iron skillet (although it does remind one a bit of Denny’s, no?), and the restaurant itself was charming and homey beyond words. But the food? It lacked the flava. Maybe my taste buds have been burned out by BBQ.

4) The road to heaven is paved with rugs.

New York is filled with the most incredible textiles. I snapped this pic at a boutique in the West Village (can’t remember the name — was obviously too dazzled by beauty) right before I tried to lay down on the floor and roll around like a dog.

5) The Met is ENORMOUS.

Trying to navigate the labyrinth that is the Met is sort of like trying to navigate the labyrinth in Labyrinth. In other words, not so easy and occasionally annoying. And filled with lines. We missed several key exhibits (Alexander McQueen) because there were just too damn many people, but I did manage to take in a few things.

I always forget what a revelation great paintings are when seen in person.

6) Anthony Caro on the roof of The Met was amazing x infinity.

I was feeling pretty pissy about The Freaking Met (mainly because they closed down all the contemporary galleries early) but then we stepped out onto the roof and oh my gawd…

I’ve always liked Anthony Caro’s sculptures, which employ various methods to control the viewer’s perspective of the work. But watching them interact with the New York skyline took it to the magic level bonus round.

Did I mention that they also had a super fancy bar up there? So you could catch a buzz, look at great work, watch falcons glide over Central Park, and ogle cute outfits. Heaven.

7) Ground Zero is still sad.

Frankly we just ran into Ground Zero after doing our part as good little capitalist consumers to stimulate the economy at Century 21. I wasn’t expecting to see it, and I certainly didn’t expect for it to make me feel that way. But it did.

That’s it for my big fancy trip, dudes babes. Back to our regular schedule tomorrow.

Have a good one!