March 01, 2005
On The Wall.
Art is hard to define, and even harder to afford.
Abstract paint smears look great on the walls of the MoMA, but when you try to duplicate them yourself cheaply, often the results look like preschool fingerpainting accidents. Good canvases can be expensive to buy and a hassle to make, and anything less looks too cheap. It's easy enough to blow up a nice photo, but getting it professionally framed and matted costs a ton. And what if all your photos consist of you and your buddies out of focus, drunk in a bar?
How do you do to fill your walls on a budget?
First off: frames.
I frame my own stuff pretty often, using discount frames from Target or Wal-Mart or even Kmart. Look at the document frames! They are cheaper!
Other possible frame discounters include dollar stores (Goldmines! If they are ugly, paint them!), or Garden Place (if ever you visit a suburb). Garden Place even has pre-cut mats in standard sizes, and you can easily assemble the whole thing yourself.
My local craft shop (The Rag Shop, in Brooklyn at 60th Street between 12th and 13th Avenues) has large, reasonably-priced frames and pre-cut mats as well.
The famous Pearl Paint also offers some framing stuff, but it's a bit more expensive there, and the website's selection is way limited and offers no mats. Any plain old art supply store should have a nice selections of pre-cut mats, but it's hit or miss.
You can always try to make your own if you get some large thicker-than-card-stock paper and an exacto knife, but mat-making without the proper professional tools really is an inexact science, and this sort of effort often looks cheap and unprofessional.
Also, a quick Google search uncovers tons of discount frames and matting. Poke around on the web and compare prices. I'm super impressed with a the website of a company called Redimat, a photo mat retailer offering great discounts on bulk orders of 4 or more.
But what to frame?
There are the usual suspects of course:
- Photos of friends, family, or vacation scenery (my personal favorite)
- Artsy postcards
- Posters (movie, advertisements, famous art prints)
- Calendar illustrations
- Maps
- Thrift-store paintings
- Notecard sets (usually one artist's work is featured on up to six different cards, so you can pick favorites or hang the whole series)
Here is a set of Edward Gorey notecards that I have up in my place. (kind of in the background):
Some new ideas:
1. Photo blogs really are everywhere, especially after the advent of sites like Shutterfly, Ofoto, and Flickr. If you see an image on a personal website that strikes your fancy, contact the photographer for a print. Most photobloggers will be flattered and give you a fair price. For example, my absolute favorite photoblog is electric boogaloo. I recently saw this great image there:
I have a thing for birds, so I purchased a print, and I believe it may be destined for my bathroom.
2. Artistic friends are awesome for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is: they make a lot of art. Sometimes they do a study for something that they later simply discard. Ask them to save some for you! Offer to pay what you can. Again, budding/struggling artists will be flattered. In my case, my friend Laura gave me a pastel drawing of a tree in silhouette that I really love (on the left) for my birthday one year:
The photo above the headboard is one I took myself, and I found that frame on super-sale at Urban Outfitters. The mat is nice and unusual, but the glass is really cheap plastic. I can't tell, can you?
3. What else is flat and cool? Behold:
On the left I have a blown-up color-copy of an old horoscope illustration from Jane Magazine, which happens to have been done by my favorite contemporary artist, Michael Gillette. He's amazing, and also illustrates for Dwell Magazine a lot.
On the right, I've got an old inkblotter from some random French primary school. I got it at a David Sedaris book reading, oddly enough, because he decided to clean out his junk drawers and storage space beforehand, and gave away all his weird junk to his fans. I love him, and I love the look of the inkblotter.
I don't have a photo handy, but one of my most prized possessions is an old crappy Xeroxed flyer for a Shins show in my old hometown record store, before they got really huge. I was in attendance, and I fell in love with their songs, and it's a great memory. I've had the flyer framed on my wall ever since.
I also love record album covers on the wall, framed or not.
Can you beat these ideas? I bet you can. So don't forget to about the contest! You've got less than three days to send me anything you've got. Ideas, crafts, photos, even just a few paragraphs of the things you love about your bedroom or your bathroom or your closets, seriously. Just impress me with your enthusuiasm and a very cool book will be your very own!
Again, all details can be found here.
Email your awesome apartment ideas to Lara@apartmentalist.com!
Edited to Add: An astute reader (Hi Alita!) called my attention to The Rasterbator. It takes any image, blows it up, and converts it into many 8.5x11 print-ready sheets, each sheet comprising a small part of a greater grid. The end result is a huge art installation of your favorite image. Check it out, it's ingenious and simple!
Posted by Lara at 04:04 PM | Comments (6)