art that I want to make sweet love to.

A good piece of original artwork is like porn to me.  I'm not particularly into 'porn', but I would imagine that it makes you really excited to decorate. I get most of mine (art, not porn) at flea markets/antique stores and reframe them. Before the holidays I took three pieces of flea market art to get professionally framed. I knew it would be expensive, but I thought to myself, 'I've worked hard this year, and art you love is always a good investment'.  I spent an hour and a half with they guy and I couldn't get the price under $400 for one of the pieces, let alone getting all three done.  Now, let's be clear, I'm super rich.  I have sooo much money.  A lot. Hundreds and hundreds of dollars in the bank. But, this isn't a priority right now, and that $400 frame was my least favorite frame and my least favorite matte, what I wanted would've cost over $1000.  So I walked away, feeling frustrated, embarrassed and defeated.

But give up, i did not.  This is what I wanted to frame:

It's an old photo that was adhered to cardboard, and its pretty big - 24x30.  I don't know why I like it - i guess the color palette, the composition and I have a thing for horses.  I realized that I have 2 ceramic horse sculptures, 1 wooden horse sculpture and 1 brass horse lamp in my small apartment.  weird, i know.

Anyway, I wanted it in a modern metal frame, black or brass, with a linen matte.  I found the frame yesterday at my local thrift store for $40, which I thought was actually still a lot for a thrift store.  I'm going to find the matte today and i'll show the finished product when i'm done with it.

I also found a bunch of beautiful botanicals for my shoot last week at the flea market and snuck away with a couple of them (although the art director took most of them, which is a good sign, by the way).  I can't stop staring at the one on the left.  I want to make love to it, i love it so much.  Botanicals are super cheap forms of nearly-original art.  If you have too  many of them, or the wrong ones, they can look super granny, but if you mix one in to art collections like above and below, they can look beautiful and modern.  I love these two for how graphic they are.  Often they are hand drawn or painted, and almost every flea market has a dealer.    Back in the day before we had cameras, the only way they had to identify flower, plants, insects, animals was for artists to draw them and label them.  These two were 10$ each and they are about 8x10.

The top two photos are from Slumber Design, not sure where this one is from. I love them all.