Art

Modern Shape, Vintage Images — Intriguing Handmade Lamps at a Reasonable Price

Written on November 3, 2011 at 12:03 pm
By Rebecca Christian

If, like me, you are drawn to flea markets where you can find nostalgic oddments such as old coins, old stamps, vintage card games, and handwritten recipes, I think you will like Monica Burke’s Table Lamps as much as I do. Working at a vintage lighting studio inspired Monica to rewire old lamps and remake them using found objects and nostalgic images from old postcards and maps. Sometimes she uses her own original photography. In her recent work, a contemporary cylindrical shape gives the lamps a modern edge.

Czech Rhino Stamp Lamp by Monica Burke

The lamps are handmade of sturdy cotton with archival grade ink. I first saw Monica’s work when my daughter — who loves handmade things and likes to support emerging artists and craftswomen — gave one of her lamps as a wedding gift. The “Appearing Quote Typewriter” Lamp looks like an old typewriter with a fresh sheet of paper in it when unlit. When turned on, a quote appears — and you can pick the quote. She’ll customize it.

Monica Burke’s Appearing Quote Typewriter Lamp

The lamps are $48 at The Daily Grommet (http://bit.ly/vGUc0Q), and you can also find her work at etsy.com.

Fish in the Garden

Written on October 18, 2011 at 3:51 pm
By Rebecca Christian

I sometimes toss press releases touting garden accents and statuary because it seems to me you can’t improve on nature, and isn’t that what gardening is all about?

Nonetheless I hung on to a flier I got from a place called Fish in the Garden in Falmouth, Maine. There artist Tyson Weiss creates schools of fish out of colorful high-fired glazed ceramics or shiny brushed stainless steel that surge through gardens and interiors in a way that is surreal and calming. I’m particularly taken with this Cobalt Koi. I find myself looking at it several times a day, especially when I’m fighting with my computer.

Grouped together, the fish appear to be swimming in a school.

You can group fish meant to adorn interiors with especially designed tabs that hold the fish an inch away from the wall, creating interesting shadows. Different species of fish are available for the sake of regional relevance—for example if you live on the Florida coast you can order a barracuda, or in Massachusetts, a striped bass or bluefin tuna. (Do you suppose he could make a whiskery river catfish for a landlocked Iowan?). Just as in nature, the fish are weatherproof. Prices range from $49 to $480. The fish are available at fishinthegarden.com.

Acres of antiques at Brimfield

Written on August 22, 2011 at 11:07 am
By Doris Athineos

Brimfield Antique Show strikes the tiny town of Brimfield, Mass, three times a year– May, July and September.  Brimfield gave birth to the Keno brothers (both parents were dealers here) and the first place the twins offered antiques (stoneware) for sale. But with more than 5,000 dealers setting up shop along Route 20, where to begin? Our favorite stretch of field is J & J, the original Brimfield show founded by Gordon Reid in 1959 and still managed by Reid’s two daughters Judy and Jill. It was the J & J show that spawned all the rest and turned Brimfield into a destination for hard-core fans of vintage and antique furnishings.  Most of the 20 shows have their own start times and dates (roughly September 6 through 11), but J & J opens September 9th @ 8 am.  Antiques junkies begin lining up at dark to be among the first to enter the gates (see above). To find the J & J field, set your GPS on 35 Main Street. For a map of different fields, see Brimfield.

Crazy for Color (and Floral Designer Jane Packer’s yummy new book)

Written on August 19, 2011 at 4:47 pm
By Rebecca Christian

I love color — I have bright red patent leather ankle strap shoes, a baby blue bicycle that makes me think of Nancy Drew’s little blue coupe, and cobalt art glass displayed on the moss green “table”  behind my couch (it’s actually a worn frosted-glass door mounted on a couple of plant stands from good old Hobby Lobby) . Oh, and at the moment my toenails are painted Mattel pink. So you can see why I swooned over British floral designer Jane Packer’s new book, Color, with such deeply saturated photographs by Georgia Glynn Smith that they’ll knock your tie-dyed socks off.

available at Amazon.com for $14.84

(http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=jane+packer+color&x=0&y=0

Packer, who has designed flowers for clients from rock stars to royalty, approaches floral design with the imagination and assured eye of a fashion or interior designer, using color to evoke mood and  intuitively understanding how fashion color trends affect the world of flowers. She notes, “Green has singlehandedly reinvented the chrysanthemum and the much-maligned carnation, reinstating them as desirable fashion flowers. Roses, anthurium and ranunculus have benefited from this infusion of green, too.” (She’s right, I think. At my son’s wedding a couple years ago, the flowers were entirely green and white, and the effect was striking.)

Working her way through the rainbow, Packer offers gorgeous floral takes on red, white, green, yellow, pink, and blue, and gives step-by-step directions for ten eye-popping projects, including a three-tiered “cake” made of scarlet roses. Here’s a topiary tree project from the Green section:

It doesn’t sound too difficult. You’ll need a container, florist foam and tape, a bamboo post, sunflowers, hydrangea flowers, and some snake grass or glossy leaves. There are simpler suggestions in the book, too, like presenting a breakfast tray with egg cups into which you’ve put not eggs, but half eggshells, filled with enough water to hydrate a tiny bloom. In other vignettes, cherry blossoms burst out of a rubber rain boot, and in a ruby vase full of brilliant parrot tulips, Packer has nestled crystal brooches among the blooms to reflect the jewel colors of the flowers and the vase. For the project below, Packer painted tree branches pink and hung them with jars of pink flowers. She’s used alstromenia in the higher jar and nerines in the lower ones, but you could use almost any pink flowers, she says. Wouldn’t the pink branches make a pretty arrangement for Easter or a bridal or baby shower?

Packer has flower shops and floral design schools in London, Tokyo, and New York, as well as a flower shop in Korea  (jane-packer.co.uk).  You can also buy her designs from janepackerdelivered.com. I especially love this arrangement of roses in a turquoise hatbox, a variation of red roses for a blue lady.

a fun arrangement from janepackerdelivered.com

I, for one, can’t wait to try her autumn wreath with oak leaves and perry pears from her book. I’m already jonesing for toasty palettes, and I know the project will put me in the mood for fall.

Decorator Maverick Billy Haines at Christie’s

Written on July 15, 2011 at 2:16 pm
By Doris Athineos

Back when interior design was just emerging as a serious, wide-spread profession in the United States, some of the top decorators in the country were creating furnishings that have stood the test of time. Think low-slung slipper chairs by movie-star-turned decorator Billy Haines (1900-1973).  Traditional Home writer Ted Loos calls these first-wave  designers “decorator mavericks” and describes the style as both neo and classical in the upcoming October issue of Traditional Home.

Now Christie’s auction house in Manhattan is offering vintage furnishings by Haines custom designed for the late Los-Angeles-based art collector Mrs. Sidney Brody.  The auction begins at Christie’s Rockefeller Center galleries this Tuesday afternoon, July 19, at 2:00 pm.  Here’s our wish list:

For close-up views of all the vintage Haines, flip through Christie’s online catalog, but don’t miss the live auction Tuesday, July 19, at 2:00 pm eastern time. Read Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines by William J. Mann (Penguin) to learn more about the Virginia-born designer who was the country’s biggest movie star by 1930.  For reissues of theclassical Haines tufted sofa, tap into williamhaines.com. And don’t miss the upcoming Decorator Mavericks story in Traditional Home which features Haines, Tony Duquette, Milwaukee-born Frances Elkins (1888-1953), Robsjohn-Gibbings, and Mississippi-born Samuel Marx (1884-1964).

Curtains for Cursive?

Written on June 23, 2011 at 4:57 pm
By Rebecca Christian

Is the keyboard mightier than the pen? Apparently so. Forty-two states  no longer require cursive writing in their curriculum, though many schools still introduce cursive in a manner that’s well, cursory.

Perfect Palmer Penmanship

Good riddance, say those for whom poor penmanship was the bane of their grade school years (especially boys). It was for them that a method called Handwriting Without Tears was developed. When even little kids learn to write on a keyboards, briskly practical people say, it’s maudlin to mourn the demise of cursive, which is going the way of the fountain pen, cuneiform and hieroglyphics. As Douglas Adams once wrote, “Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.”

Cuneiform, written on clay with a reed for a stylus

Traditionalists fear, though, that when the death bell tolls for cursive, more than loops and flourishes (and the dotting of Is with hearts by the young female of the species) is lost. It can be argued that cursive hones fine motor skills, improves ideation and expression, teaches letters and shapes, enhances memory, reveals personality (remember the dubious “science” of  handwriting analysis?) and links us to the past.

How I quaked in my white pleather go-go boots in 8th grade when Miss Ryerson, she of the hot dragon breath and dandruff collar, picked up one of my papers with its curlicued capitals,  exaggerated slant, floaters (letters that drifted above the line) and sinkers (below). Her mission was to stamp out all evidence of individuality in handwriting, and it was really rather thrilling when her beady eyes bored into yours – at least in the unrelieved tedium of school, your abject, scalp-tingling terror reminded you that you were still alive. She believed that sloppy handwriting indicates sloppy thinking, and I hate to admit it, but I’ve come to agree. At the beginning of the semester you were allowed three erasures per paper, and at the end, “Zero!,” as she proclaimed with fanatical zeal.

Today, many teens and twentysomethings have a hard time deciphering cursive, which means that reading historic documents – or even their grandparents’ letters – is difficult. If you’re like me, you treasure the instant intimacy conferred by coming upon a recipe, letter, or receipt with your late loved ones’ script on it. Letters from my dad on onion skin paper have writing as gangly as he was, its controlled haste evidence of twin inclinations toward perfectionism and speed.

When I want to put soul into writing, my first draft is longhand in black ink on yellow legal paper rather than keyboarded, and I swear the difference in the result is as marked as that between instant coffee and brewed. Yet, I envy writers who can compose brilliantly on a laptop.  And I still chuckle at Truman Capote’s snotty dismissal of showboater Jack Kerouac’s legendary feat of typing his stream-of-consciousness travelogue On the Road on paper that he taped into a 120-foot scroll. “That’s not writing,” Capote sneered. “That’s typing.”

Of course, everything was new once, and cursive itself was developed to make handwriting faster by connecting letters to make a word all at once, avoiding blots because the quill didn’t have to be lifted from the page as often. Like many objects invention has rendered inefficient, the fountain pen and the typewriter have achieved what typewriter collector Richard Polt calls “the allure of the archaic.” Hence the popularity of Mont Blanc’s John Lennon Special Edition Fountain Pen, retailing for $1,000 (imagine!).

The Mont Blanc John Lennon Fountain Pen

Meanwhile hipsters have begun collecting and using typewriters. I love them, too, along with Anne Sexton’s poem in which she calls her typewriter “my church with an altar of keys always waiting.”

Poet Anne Sexton

In a clever infusion of the old into the new, there’s even an app through which you can handwrite words with a finger or stylus and see them transformed into the magic of print to be emailed or tweeted.

Do you think it should be curtains for cursive?

This post originally appeared in the Telegraph Herald, Dubuque, Iowa.

Trash or treasure?

Written on June 14, 2011 at 12:45 pm
By Doris Athineos

A Quick Foodie Guide to New York

Written on June 8, 2011 at 3:58 pm
By Stephen Exel

While in New York City to shoot June’s story on the cooking school at Lidia Bastianich’s food emporium, Eataly, art director Brenda Cort and I took advantage of the city’s diverse culinary offerings.

Dining at Eataly in New York

Knowing three days of eating dangerously lie ahead, we started with a light lunch at Eataly’s vegan lunch counter. Lunch included Brussels Sprout Bruschetta—quickly sautéed Brussels sprout leaves, seasoned with red pepper and lemon juice, and served over thick slices of grilled bread—a dish that has become a favorite for both of us to prepare at home.

Dinner at chef Dan Barber’s Blue Hill will dispel any notions that sustainable farm-to-table cooking is a Birkenstock-and-denim affair. Jackets are requested for gentlemen and the small, elegantly appointed restaurant has a well thought-out wine list to complement the exquisite menu. Dinner featured Halloran Farm venison with cranberries and celery root and a salad of gorgeous just-picked greens. (75 Washington Place, 212/539-1776; bluehillfarm.com)

The cocktails and chainmail draperies have equal glamour at the venerable Four Seasons restaurant’s bar. The square bar, capped by Richard Lippold’s impressive brass rod sculpture, anchors this modernist gem designed in 1959 by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. (99 E. 52^nd St., 212/754-9494; fourseasonsrestaurant.com)

The Glamourous Bar at The Four Seasons

We hit the late-night jazz club scene at the landmark Birdland. The “jazz corner of the world” still attracts the genre’s biggest names. The club features a casual Cajun-inspired dinner menu with dishes as spicy as the music. (315 W. 44^th St., 212/581-3080; birdlandjazz.com)

The day after our shoot, I explored Astor Center Wine and Spirits. One of the staff members helped me navigate the wine selections; then I headed upstairs to check out the Study, the center’s state-of-the art wine-tasting venue (each seat includes a light box to correctly view a wine’s color) where wine classes are held almost daily. (399 Lafayette St., 212/674-7501; astorcenternyc.com)

Two museums in landmarked buildings held my attention in the afternoon. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (2 E. 91^st St., cooperhewitt.org), in the Andrew Carnegie Mansion, has just been renovated. Then I headed down the street to the former home of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III to view the collection of early 20^th century German art at the Neue Galerie (1048 5^th Ave., neuegalerie.org), but mostly to have a restorative chocolate and Viennese pastry at the museum’s charming Café Sabarsky.

Weeds (no, not the HBO show)

Written on May 5, 2011 at 11:39 am
By Rebecca Christian

If as a kid, you puzzled over why your parents were trying to eradicate pretty little dandelions, you’ll enjoy British nature writer’s Richard Mabey’s bemused, philosophical, and wide-ranging meander through the subject of weeds in his new book of the same name.

On this eloquent tour through history, nature, fine art, and the Bible, the author considers the carpets of poppies on the battlefields of World War I and the Faustian bargains struck by modern commercial agriculture, quoting everyone from Shakespeare to Winnie the Pooh to Emerson along the way.

I was especially taken with Mabey’s account of how kudzu overtook the South. If you’ve ever driven through the rural southern states, you know how bizarrely it enshrines abandoned tractors, chimneys, and outbuildings — the remnants of  a vanishing rural, low-tech way of life. Like so many endeavors that turn out to be catastrophic — a second martini, a cruise on the Titanic, a Sunday drive with Ted Bundy –  kudzu seemed like a good idea at the time. Here is a photo of an abandoned cabin overtaken by kudzu, snapped by Jack Anthony, who has a fascinating website on the subject  (http://www.jjanthony.com/kudzu/).

Kudzu, Mabey explains, was introduced to the U.S. at the Centennial Exposition in Philly in 1876 as part of a much-admired garden of Japan’s native plants. First gardeners planted it as an ornamental, then cows started munching on it, and in the fullness of time it was planted by the Soil Conservation Service to halt erosion. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has outlawed it, but that’s like outlawing misery or gossip or Donald Trump’s combover. Mabey shines in his description of kudzu, “this remorsely advancing cloak.” He writes, “It has a primordial aura, as if an ancient city had been overwhelmed by the jungle. The trees look as if they have been petrified by green lava, or a monochrome coral, or are the seaweed-enfolded relics of a wrecked ship.”

On a lighter note are his tales of famous weeds in literature. I hadn’t realized that the love-in-idleness plant which figures so prominently in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is wild pansy. Lovers of the bard will recall that when its squeezed into the eyes of beautiful Titania, queen of the fairies, as she slumbers in the forest, it causes her to fall in love with the first thing she sees upon awakening: Alas, an ass! (Many a woman who has lived to regret the morning after will empathize.) Here is the lovely Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania, enamored with Kevin Kline as Nick Bottom, in the 1999 film version.

Mabey also points out that in the Harry Potter books, instinctive writer that she is, J.K. Rowling uses the fictional pus-filled “bubotuber” to capture the horrifying and rapidly toxic effects of weeds like poison ivy, which DOES seem like black magic because boils like those that plagued Job can erupt on your tender parts merely from drying with a towel that has touched it. She also limns the dual nature of weeds: bubotuber is beneficial for the treatment of acne but undiluted can excoriate the skin.

The book releases June 28 but you can pre-order it for $16 from Amazon.com now: http://www.amazon.com/Weeds-Defense-Natures-Unloved-Plants/dp/0062065459

Free design consultation with award-winning designers

Written on April 27, 2011 at 11:43 am
By Doris Athineos

Consider cruising the five-day Spring Show NYC as 65 dealers from around the country strut their stuff at the Park Avenue Armory. The show opens this Thursday and all opening-night proceeds benefit the ASPCA which explains the spotlight on animal-themed antiques. At the press preview, we fell for an ancient bronze ganesh, a pair of dashing Chinese porcelain hawks, a powerful terra-cotta Mastiff (above), and eagle-topped bull’s eye mirror, but you may also leave with one of the  leashed critters (up for adoption!) greeting guests at the door Thursday evening. On Friday night, Traditional Home’s award-winning “New Trad” designers will offer one-on-one design consultations gratis so come armed with your photos, paints chips and floor plans. There’s also a chance to bid for more extensive consultations with designs pros Patrik Lonn and Sara Gilbane, among others.

Never has the Armory looked more alive!