I love this poster

Who wants to buy me a present?!  I want it!  It's by the illustrator Exem (Emanuel Excoffier) whose posters were found all around Geneva, Switzerland.  The Swiss are in the top five for countries that produce the most famous or valuable posters.  Italy, France and Germany are obviously in that group too.  Perhaps, the US is in there too?  IDK.  This poster urges voters to not let a historic building get destroyed.  Man, it pops.  I know, I say that a lot, but that's what I like about poster art, the pop.  I like that this one mixes reality with fantasy.  It's not old either, done in 1990, but it is expensive (so far as I found in my searches).  This and the Africa poster I blogged about previously are the two leading candidates in my most wanted list.  There's lots on my want list and I'll eventually share them as well.

I keep track of all the posters I like or want in an excel file.  Is that nerdy?  I keep info about sizes, artists, best prices, dates, vendors etc.  Yeah, I guess that is nerdy.  It's like I formalized the Christmas wishlist that we would write to Santa as kids.  I have lots of websites I explore for new posters as well as all of its details. I also explore eBay too, which is tricky because you never really know what you're buying on there.  You gotta love it enough to not care if it's original or not to take a risk on an auction site.  Although, some of the biggest poster dealers have eBay accounts, which you can trust, but their prices are silly high.

Anyways, if any of you hit the lottery, let me know, I can help you invest (waste) your money.

Vespa!

In case you haven't figured it out, me and B like big animals: elephants, giraffes, tigers, lions, zebras etc.  So a lot of our interior decorating involves these big animals.  It's like we want live in a zoo! 

Here's a vintage poster we picked up on eBay for that obvious reason, but for some other reasons too.  One thing that B always asks when I look at potentially obtaining art is, "where will you put it?"  Well, with this one and Babar-like elephant, that's also obvious, not that we're planning ahead or anything.  It's got great color and it pops.  Plus, I like Vespas.  I don't own one, but maybe one day I'll be that oddball teacher that shows up to work on an old Vespa and my sports coat with the elbow patches. 

The poster was produced by the Piaggio & C scooter company in 1959 and designed by Ditta Giuseppe Lang, S.P.A, which is a graphic arts studio in Genova, Italy.  I wish I could tell you more about it, but I can't read any of the Italian on any of the sites I googled.  If you can help, let me know!

Bahama Coffee Company

So in case you don't know, I have somehow miraculously engineered a research program (with the help of a colleague) that requires me to spend time in the Bahamas a few times a year.  Hard life, I know.  I'm currently doing research on mangrove ecology on the relatively undeveloped island of Eleuthera.  ps. I'm always looking for some interesting mangrove art, but haven't found any. Because I spend so much time there, I don't really bother with the knickknacks and cheesy souvenirs.  You would be surprised how much of that crap is made somewhere else!  So getting Bahamian art that suits my fancy and is truly Bahamian is a challenge.  I have plenty of more trips to find something though.

On this past trip, I did pick up an interesting poster at a good price, free!  It's for the Bahama Coffee Company, which doesn't exist anymore.  Once upon a time, there was restaurant with that name at the Cape Eleuthera Marina, but it has since been defunct.  The poster was made for advertising purposes and prints were sold at the marina store, but I guess since the place went out of business, the store couldn't justify charging for it anymore.  Yay for me.  I wasn't able to identify the artist, but the print is dated.  The artwork is quite Bahamian in the color usage.  They tend to use pastel colors, particularly in pinks and blues.  Something odd, which I hadn't noticed until my wifey pointed it out is how long the guy's tie is!  I'll let you decide the meaning behind that. 

a little of both of us

My friend Mark suggested that if I wanted to get Bethany into poster art, I should consider approaching it from her perspective first by focusing on things she likes.  Well, she's into fashion.  She likes to read about it and look at all sorts of clothes and shoes.  She likes shoes.  One of her favorite designers is Betsey Johnson.  Betsey's style is, as Bethany describes it, "Girly Punk."  From my perspective, Betsey is fun and definitely eye catching, which is what I generally look for in a poster. 

So I looked up vintage fashion posters to see what came up.  A Frenchman named Berbard Villemot did a lot interesting stuff for the Bally shoe company.  One poster that caught my eye is called "Bally Kick," which was done near the end of Villemot's life in the 1980s.  Bethany likes it too.  What do you think?

My current poster wishlist

This is subject to change!  This subject to grow! 

Africa by David Klein (1960s). Great colors that would totally go well in our living room.

Philadelphia by David Klein (1960s).  Because it's Philly, duh.

Cognac Monnet by Leonetto Cappiello (1927).  Great color, great value and it's beautiful. 

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.

Some new art.

I'm a cat guy.  You can thank my cat Marty McFly for that.  He's a stud.  I like other cats too: tigers, lions, ocelots etc. I've got more into tigers recently because of the stuff I've read recently while researching some things about saber-toothed cats for a book I'm writing, but may never finish.  I discovered this theory that the sabre-toothed cat possibly went extinct because of people.  And I learned that tigers may go extinct in our lifetime.  This is saddest thing ever.  Why are they in trouble?  Stupid people obviously.  We have hunted them for all kinds of stupid reasons, for furs, fertility medicines which don't work and for our own entertainment, namely the circus.

Circuses have been enslaving all kinds of wild animals.  I started reading about that too on one of my internet crawls (which is like a beer crawl, but instead of going from bar to bar, I go from site to site fueled not by alcohol, but my own endless curiosity).  While exploring about the history of circuses I started noticing the old posters that were used to advertise for them.  I loved them.  The color, the pop.  I wanted one and I wanted one with a tiger.  You may ask, but Ped doesn't that glorify the problem?  Wouldn't having a poster celebrate the cruelty that we did and do to tigers?  Perhaps, but I'm looking at it differently.  I pursued an old circus poster as reminder of what we did in the past, that we actually are responsible for our actions and that we need to conserve the natural world and what's left of it. And cause like I said before, I like tigers.

There are lots and lots of reprint posters out there.  I wanted something original.  Well original posters are expensive.  I'm talking more than a hundred bucks.  I've seen some greater than a thousand.   This is because of rarity due to the fact that they were made on the cheap and not to last.  They were made for advertising purposes in which they were just glued to walls where they would sit for a few weeks until someone came along and glued another poster on top.  Think of the advertising you would see on the boards around construction sites in the city.  This is why they are printed on cheap crappy paper, like newsprint, so they do last that long.  Many collectors buy these posters and have them mounted to canvas where they can be treated a little more roughly.

I searched some shops in the city and some estate sales (my Sunday alone-time past-time).  But I couldn't find any that I both liked and could afford.  So where do you go for stuff on the cheap?  Ebay, duh.  After several months of searching, I came across an original poster from 1952 being sold by someone who was selling a circus collection of a collector who recently passed away.  The poster was cheaper than normal because it was misprinted.  A defect.  I like defects though because they remind me of the process of making the poster.  You don't think about the process when the poster is in good form.  So I bid and won it for pretty cheap.  Since I didn't spend that much on it, I decided to frame it up nice and grown-up like.  I've provided a picture.  It makes me happy.  I think about the process of making it and I think about tigers.  Isn't that the point of art? To make you think?  To make you happy?