Here's were I rant about the arts. Take it with a grain of salt, I'm a scientist.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Wedding gifts to ourselves

So now that I'm a mature adult with a house and wife (do those things make you a mature adult?), I want to have real art around the house.  What do I mean by that?  We won't just put things around the house we like, but perhaps some with value.  I want to invest, but stocks and business crap bore me and my comic book collection is barely getting my money back, so original art is!  So far, I have convinced Bethany to go with it.  No more dorm room posters! We've transitioned from thumbtacks to nails.  That's how you know something is real art, if it requires nails. 

Speaking of dorm room posters, if you are into the history of posters or follow the poster market at all, which I recently am, it seems that posters that may have been on a dorm room wall decades ago seem to have value now.  Well, as long as they are original printings, no reproductions.  People are paying hundreds of dollars for original printings of the Star Wars movies and Farrah Fawcett.  It's funny, but nostalgia pays.

Anyways, I though I would share some of the new pieces we have in our house.  The first is a sculpture that I bought for Bethany as a wedding present.  In our first year of dating, I was living in Texas and she was home in Delaware.  Since we had to fly to see each other, we would at times meet in other cities.  She saw this piece in Santa Fe years ago and I took a mental picture of it.  Bethany loves Giraffes and family, which I think is part of what drew her to the piece.  It's called "Daddy Long Legs" by Todd Warner.  It's part of series all featuring animals sitting on furniture that has the same print as they do.  If you check out Todd's Website, you'll see how he gives a dreamy humanistic quality to his animals.  We like animals.  Most of our art features animals.  She was stunned when she got this gift.  She couldn't believe that I remembered.  Given that it was five years ago, I'm glad she remembered too!


The next two were wedding gifts we bought for ourselves on our honeymoon in Hawaii.  I convinced Bethany that rather than using our gift money just to pay off our wedding, why not buy some things for ourselves.

The first is a Normal Rockwell print you may have seen before.  I have always been into poster art.  When I saw that the old fishing town of Lahaina had a vintage European poster store, I was hoping to pick up a cool European throwback.  As you can see that's not what we got.  Let's just say that me and Bethany have different tastes!  We looked at dozens of posters and this piece was the only one she seemed really responsive to, obviously because of the faith thing.  It's cool, though because I have always like Rockwell's realism and I don't mind reminders for her to stay faithful.  This one is War World II propaganda piece (1943).  It was part of series of four prints that promote buying war bonds in order to preserve our freedoms.  Maybe I'll convince her to let us get a European piece eventually!


The last is a numbered giclee by Robert Bissell.  It is part of a series called, "Hero."  All of Robert's works feature animals in whimsical manners.  We also got this in Lahaina.  I never get bored at looking at it and it makes a great statement piece in our house.  It's currently above our fireplace.


2 comments:

mark said...

love the elephant!

ped said...

can you tell from the picture that those are butterflies?