by abby on April 22, 2013 | Comment
I’ve been away visiting my parents for an extended weekend. It was a lovely retreat from my day to day hussle of running my own business. I got to lounge on comfy couches reading books and I even fell asleep in the sunshine on the living room carpet (I know I’m like a cat!) .
{Yellow tulips on the kitchen table}
As you can see my mom also enjoys splashes of color in her home too. All over the house there are touches of spring yellow and bright blue. Blue and yellow is one of my favorite color combinations and I think I now see where I get it!
{Bowls of fruit under the kitchen window}
I love this wreath!
{The front door}
I found typography too in the house…
Perhaps having a daughter who loves letters inspired some decorating?
Thanks to my little “time-out” I feel refreshed and ready to get back to book design and painting this week. I hope you too are feeling good and have a great week!
What Spring colors are in your house?
by abby on December 4, 2012 | Comment
D and I took a trip to New York City over the weekend and thanks to my best friend we got to experience a very cool public art exhibit. It’s an outdoor (but really indoor) installation by Tatzu Nishi called Discovering Columbus and you will soon see why.
This is what we saw when we came out of the subway:
We were invited to climb the stairs inside the scaffolding.
This is me admiring the view as we climb:
And on the landing just before we step inside this is what we saw. Amazing!
And finally we stepped inside a newly constructed and fully furnished living room built around the stone statue of Christopher Columbus 75 feet in the air!
This was the wallpaper:
You could sit on the chairs, watch a flat screen TV, and admire the amazing views out the windows.
I highly recommend seeing this artwork yourself! The city views alone are fantastic. You do need to reserve a ticket, but happily they are FREE. Yay!
Have you recently seen some amazing artwork? I’d love to hear about it.
by abby on August 24, 2012 | Comment
I’m back from a great week at the beach! D and I had a wonderful vacation at the Victorian seaside town of Cape May, NJ. It’s one of my most cherished spots in the world.
I do love the beach-really at any hour, but mornings on the beach when the light is soft and it’s just you and the ocean are my favorite. One morning I brought watercolors and a few scraps of cold press watercolor paper with me during a stroll in the sand. D was kind enough to sit and let my creativity flow. He was sneaky and snapped a few photos of me “in the zone”!
I sat near a lifeguard chair and row boat. It was fun just to combine the pencil and loose watercolor washes. No pressure, just letting the paint flow.
D got a little closer!
I look so serious, but I truly had a blast painting in the sand! For my last watercolor sketch I looked down the beach to all the emerging beach goers and beach gear. I focused on the pops of color.
It was so much fun to sit in the sand and paint. I wished I had one more morning to do this again. I did take several photos of the beach and around town. I’m planning on turning a few of those into watercolor paintings too. After this vacation, I feel refreshed and energized to start creating again.
Where is your favorite vacation spot?
by abby on March 6, 2012 | Comment
My boyfriend and I took a long weekend to visit friends in Chicago. It was our first visit to this mid-west city and our friends, Kirk and Tracie, were amazing tour guides. We hopped buses, “L” trains, and pounded the pavement to see the sights.
It turned out to be a great art weekend. Chicago is home to one of my favorite paper stores, Paper Source, so of course, it was on our list to see. It was great fun to fill my shopping basket with brightly colored envelopes and not have to pay shipping!
Then later on, while waiting out a rain storm in a coffee shop, I casually looked out the back door to see a giant Dick Blick art supply store. Fate stepped in, I swear. I don’t have one of these stores in Rochester and as it turns out they are a wonderful supplier of art boards that are treated to either paint directly onto or you can mount prints to them. I took a few to experiment. My suite case was becoming heavier and heavier as the weekend continued.
The climax of this art weekend was visiting The Art Institute of Chicago. It’s a museum that surprised me with its collection. They have several gems in their galleries. As an artist it’s always a thrill to stand in front of the original painting that you have studied for years and only seen as a 3″ x 5″ rectangle in a book. Seeing Edward Hopper’s Nighthawkes caused me to have such a moment.
The painting is so much larger than I imagined! I think I could stare at this painting for 15 minutes and not be board. Hopper has created a very compelling visual story. Who are these people and why are they at this diner?
Another favorite artist of mine is Toulouse-Lautrec. I’ve known him for painting cabaret girls and the night-life of Paris, but I didn’t know he also went through a circus phase.
I love how the horse is painted and the perspective Lautrec created.
Finally, in the education center at the museum was a small exhibition of the children’s book paper illustrator, Steve Jenkins. He creates beautiful illustrations of animals and insects with cut paper collage. The detail of these creatures is amazing. Here are a couple of my favorites.
These illustrations are used in non-fiction picture books that share with young readers amazing animal facts.
Phew—what a weekend! My thanks to our hosts for their great hospitality and for trekking along to all the art stores and museums. D and I really did love seeing Chicago and I’m sure we will be back—next time in warmer weather!
by abby on July 19, 2011 | Comment
I was on the road again this time heading south to Maryland. As always I’m on the look out for interesting typography and design. Once your eye is trained to look for these examples it is hard not to find objects along your way worthy of a photo.
While having a day in Annapolis to shop at the FABULOUS paper store, Paper Source, the winding streets led me to this painted advertisement on the side of a brick building. I do love to find decaying or weathered type. The layered of pealing paint give this sign even more visual impact.
As I passed the marina, I came upon a coffee house called City Dock Coffee. I found their logo to be quite clever.
Did you catch the sun rising on the horizon as it becomes the coffee mug? Nice touch!
Finally, the weekend ended with watching an Orioles baseball game at Camden Yards. Even here at a baseball stadium there is great design. This is the clock that sits on top of the big screen in the stadium. I love the vintage feel of the type of “Orioles” and the beautiful twisting ironwork surrounding the clock face.
You just never know where you will find an eye catching example of great typography or design!
by abby on June 29, 2011 | Comment
Hope you enjoyed the texture brain teaser yesterday. Now for the answers!
Texture 1
Succulent plant, Hens and Chicks (you gotta it Kirk!)
Texture 2
Seaweed
Texture 3
Large clovers
Texture 4
Redwood bark
Texture 5
Driftwood
Texture 6
Pier poles in the bay
Texture 7
Totally weird plant found in gardens at The Getty! (Looked like coral to me.)
Where you close? How many did you know?
I’ll leave you with a couple more views from the west coast.
Just makes me want to jump on a plane and head back out west!
by abby on June 3, 2011 | Comment
While our stomachs were satisfied by amazing meals, D and I were able to feed our minds as well by visiting a couple of museums during our long weekend in NYC. I love art museums and miss them terribly since I moved out of the New York area. It’s strange how when something is so accessible you take it for granted, but now that I’m 6 hours away I miss my afternoon visits to The Met, MOMA, The Whitney, the Guggenheim, The Frick and so many more. Since we had limited time for museum visits, D and I decided to divide and conquer. While he’s a great admirer and art appreciator, let’s say that when given the choice between an art museum and a history museum, D will choose the latter. No problem for me! Have you ever strolled the galleries of a museum by yourself? It’s luxurious. There’s no schedule, no waiting for someone to finishing viewing a gallery before you move on, and no following along someone else. You simply decide to linger or skip over artworks of your choosing. For me my favorite spot in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a little, actually tiny, gallery on the second floor that displays the Degas pastel drawings of ladies bathing. The lighting is dimmed to protect the art, so it feels even more intimate. The drawings are just breath taking! I have long been a fan of pastels. I love the texture each stroke creates and the layering of colors. I have even created a few works myself using this medium, but Degas just takes it to another level. The layering of the colors to create the shading on the skin is beautiful. When you look closely you see blues and bright greens! I lingered again and again over these half a dozen pieces of art. I hated to say good-bye, but perhaps someday I will have a print of one of these bathers in my own house.
While I was visiting Degas, Monet, Van Gogh, and Cezanne on the upper eastside, D was visiting the inner workings of the brain and learning about the celestial skies on the upper Westside at the Natural History Museum. After a couple of hours, I walked through Central Park to meet him on the west side. Don’t laugh, but after 7 years of living in NYC, I never got to see the tribute to John Lennon. Happily I stumbled upon it over the weekend. I wonder if the rose is always placed above the type? We shared our museum adventures in the East Village at our favorite Jewish diner on 2nd Ave. I had my standard of homemade lentil soup and a grilled cheese sandwich—made with challah bread of course! Little bit of heaven right there.
The following day D and I stayed downtown in Manhattan. We started the morning with breakfast in Battery Park and then made our way over to the Smithsonian Native American Museum. There’s a museum here in NYC and another in Washington DC. This museum is housed in the original custom’s house. It’s a gorgeous building with a large central room topped by an oval ceiling covered in murals. The exhibition galleries surround this central room. One of the exhibits we saw was about the significance of “the horse” within several of the Native American tribes. The show was interesting and had a wide variety of artifacts, but for me the best part was the icon of a horse developed specifically to promote the show. The stylization came from actually Native American drawings on blankets and on stone. The horse logo is wonderfully simple and expressive. Even from this icon you begin to feel the energy and power of the horse within Native American culture.
All in all, it was a truly marvelous visit to New York. D and I are already looking forward to our next trip down.
by abby on May 31, 2011 | Comment
Over the long weekend I took a trip to my former city of residence, New York City. I consider myself a visitor to NYC, not a tourist. A tourist does the tourist things—Times Square, Empire State Building, and eats in Little Italy. Not D and I. No, we still have an insider’s map of New York. We walk the smaller streets and sought out the tucked away patches of green grass to sip our ice coffees. D and I had 4 days of “the best of our NYC”—a good portion of that “best” involved food. Our days were structured over where we would have breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and drinks. We didn’t want to waste any food opportunity! The consensus between us is that good Asian cuisine is difficult to find in Rochester. For this New York trip we focused our taste buds on Thai in Park Slope (Song), Korean in the West Village (Do Haw), and thanks for a great tip from an even greater friend, we had top quality Sushi in Crown Heights (Gen). Thinking about all those places now makes my mouth water. Go to any of them, next time you are in the area.
My absolute favorite dessert place is the famous Magnolia Bakery. Whether it was a good thing or not, my office used to be very close to this bakery. Just walking into the shop is a treat with its pastel palette and ultra feminine retro vibe. I just adored this fabric triangle flag banner hung above the counter. D and I shared a cup of Magnolia’s Banana Pudding in a small park diagonal from the bakery. Yum!
Without the stress of having to be somewhere at a certain time D and I strolled the streets people watching and reminiscing. At my slower walking pace, I found examples of great typography on signs, on windows, and even in tag sale in East Village.
I was happy that the neighborhoods I once walked through on a daily basis still remained familiar. I had no problem navigating around sans map whether it was on the street or in the subway. Just walking around Park Slope and the West Village was like seeing an old friend, each street corner had a memory to tell. There’s much more to share! In between our food extravaganzas, I did visit a couple of museums. I’ll tell you more about those adventures on Friday.
