Airings on Design by Area Aesthetics

Art: Go With Your Heart! Shreds by New York Artist Sheila Smith

I'm almost always surprised by my own art purchases. Intellectually, I would say I know exactly what I like. But then something totally different will grab me in a way I hadn't anticipated. That's how I felt when I first saw Sheila Smith's "Shreds," a recent series of acrylic and shredded paper paintings on canvas.

Reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionist and Non-Objective schools of the 50's, Shreds is all about color, texture and design. The works would beautifully complement  a modern interior that could benefit from a punch of color as well as some softer lines. 

Influenced by Joan Mitchell, Willem De Kooning and the repetitive, emphatic brush work of Van Gogh, Sheila returned to painting late last year after a decade of devoting her talents to art photography. Spurred by her own photographs of street art - from graffiti to rust stains on dumpsters -  she describes their effect on her as "so painterly that I felt the tug to return."

In the Shreds series, long strips of paper have taken on the central role of the flowing brush strokes seen in some of her earlier paintings, such as "Yellow Dream." Her appreciation for the beauty of the stroke she attributes to her father's wonderful handwriting,  while many other aspects of her work reflect her own light-hearted, fun-loving and engaged personality.

A number of pieces in the Shreds series by this Brooklyn-born, long time resident of Manhattan will be featured in a group show at the Caelum Gallery in Manhattan from July 14 - 25. If you're local, plan a visit to see Sheila's work. And, if you're in the market, you'll be happy to know that the works, which range in size from 11" x 14"  to 30" x 40", are very affordably priced.  

[Top to bottom: Anxiety 16" x 20";  Here Comes the Bride 20" x 32";   Feeling Good 16"x 20"]

(Click on pictures for full sized photos.)

Design with a Sense of Humor - Home Accessories to Make You Smile

Finally after 12 days of rain, the sun came out yesterday, only to disappear again behind this morning's thunderstorms.  It's been a gloomy two weeks of gray skies and and indoor living.  It helps to have things in your home that make you smile.

For me, it's framed photos that bring back memories of fun times and some of the pieces in my collection of John Lennon's artwork. (A great songwriter,  but also a great humorist, which comes through in many of his drawings.) Then there's the "happy mistake":   The bathroom the painter painted the wrong color - but which I ended up keeping because every time I walked in the room, it made me smile.

Walking thorough ICFF this year, there were a few home accessory designers who set out, tongue in cheek, to give you a chuckle and, perhaps, bring a smile into your home.  

The first table I saw at the back of the show in an area known as "The Mart"  was Heather Lins Home. I immediately loved this couple. They were having a great time exhibiting their line of  screen-printed accessories and were fun to talk with. Heather calls her business a "doodle factory" where sketches grow up to become real things. She's inspired by the ordinary and has based her collection on images that are readily identifiable but show up somewhere unexpected.

Her square and rectangular "Conversation Pieces" are a series of  throw pillows that she calls "an ode to the art of conversation."   Her "Eye Chart," with what appears to be a slightly blurry rendition of the familiar on a  17" x 17" pillow, is packaged with a pair of 3-D glasses that will bring this playful take on an icon of modern life into full focus.  Heather also showed a line of place mats, napkins and coasters called Numbered Edition.

Further down the aisle where the British were bringing their wry humor to the party, I found Thelermont Hupton. This award-winning team of designers from London reinvent everyday objects with an irreverence for the mundane.  They showed a range of witty home accessories and table top items, but it was their collections of wall hooks that brought a smile to my face.  "Hand Jobs,"  lacquered coat hooks - or wall art, if you prefer - are modeled on familiar hand gestures.  The kitchen themed "Stuck on You Hooks" are described by the designers as "pre-thrown cutlery."

(Click on pictures for full-sized photos.)

Confessions of an App Addict - The Skinny on Color Apps for the iPhone

Confession:  I'm one of those people who actually hired someone to line sit for me for two days in front of the Apple Store to get one of the first iPhones.  And the next year, I upgraded to the 16 meg phone so that I would have plenty of room for apps, which for me held the promise of having everything I need in the palm of my hand as I race around town for my design clients.

With 88 apps on my phone,  I pretty much have almost everything  I need - my client database, a level, a clinometer, rulers and calipers, a protractor, unit converters, shipment trackers, geo-locator apps,  and a fair sampling of e-books and games to keep me occupied should I get stuck in an elevator cut off from the world for a few hours.

I also have quite a few color apps, more than I need and more than I use.  However, as someone who is totally bewitched by color and the endless possibilities that color offers in interior design, I figure you can never have too many of those.  But, I was still waiting for the perfect color app. So I was excited a few weeks ago to read on Benjamin Moore senior interior designer Sonu Mathew's blog,  that the company whose paints I spec most often was releasing a color app of its own.

It finally became available on Monday and I tested it, comparing it to my other color apps, through the wee hours of the morning. The bottom line is that I'm still searching for the perfect color app, but one of these may meet your needs.  Here's the lowdown.

I'm not sure that Benjamin Moore's  ColorCapture app is ready for prime time.  It's a  very slow launch and seems to have a few serious bugs, such as your workspace disappearing and occasional freezes. Like many color apps, it starts with the assumption that you want to match a color, either already in your photo album or in a new photo that you take from the "capture" screen. Unlike Sherwin Williams' Color Snap, a similar app,  choosing your key color from the photo by tapping is hit or miss and often takes a few tries to grab the color you want. Color Snap, by comparison, uses an arrow cursor with an enlarged view of the target pixel that you can drag around the screen, making it very easy to hit the exact color.

Interestingly,  when I took a new photo, a small object on a large Benjamin Moore color swatch, ColorCapture missed by a mile trying to match the color swatch. However,  once that photo was saved to an album and I repeated the process choosing the saved photo, its performance improved, but wasn't perfect.  Color Snap hit the color dead on using both methods, perhaps because it saves the photo before it allows you to target the color.

ColorCapture generates a harmonizing palette of 4 or 5 colors from a broad spectrum, and a strip of darker and lighter values.  Importantly, it also gives you the flexibility to select another color in the palette as your key color and a shake of the iPhone will bring up new palettes.  However, it only saves the key color from the palette. ColorSnap on the other hand offers just one simple three-color palette, but saves the entire color scheme, and the developers have thoughtfully provided RGB values so you can easily move the colors into a computer-based design program. 

Both apps have retail store locators that utilize GPS. ColorSnap warns you that you are exiting the app to find a store, but Color Capture doesn't.  A "Ben" button at the top of ColorCapture's locator screen doesn't take you back to the app's functions as you would expect, but rather, is just a drop down ad.

ColorCapture also includes a rudimentary color wheel, but I'm not sure why.  There doesn't seem to be any way to move your key color into the color wheel without selecting it again from the wheel - no quick task with the hit or miss fingertip at work.  Both apps would be vastly improved as palette generators with the additional ability to directly enter a specific paint color as your key color,  and ColorCapture's color wheel could be really useful if you then could choose the section of the wheel from which you wanted harmonizing colors.

Both of these apps are free and have their strengths. But neither comes close to being a fully functional color app for design such as Color Expert or my personal favorite, Palettes.  When it comes to interior design, I don't know how many people pick the key paint color in their scheme from a photo.  But I do know that many people, including many professionals, will pull paint colors from a multi-colored fabric or need to match paint colors from a logo when working on commercial interiors.

While Palettes will let you choose a single pixel in an image, it also can capture up to 25 colors from a single source - photo, web page, computer image, CSS file or third party palette. It generates a swatch palette comprising all of the captured colors, which you can manipulate with drag and drop ease to test out key colors, as well as blends, and monochromatic, analogous, complementary, triadic and split complimentary color schemes.   Rather than have the app dictate the fleshed out color scheme from a single target color, Palettes gives you a lot of control over the scheme and the number of colors used and saves all of the colors in your workspace.

What Palettes lacks is the simple functionality of both ColorCapture and Color Snap when it comes to interior design: the ability to match paint colors to your scheme.  Palettes makes it easy for you to email or export your schemes in a variety of common application formats and so my work-around has been to export the scheme as a Photoshop palette and then match it to a paint color using the free downloadable Photoshop palettes available from the Benjamin Moore web site.

It works, but I'm still searching for that perfect iPhone color app.

MAD About Bean - Limited Edition Rugs by the Noted Ceramic Artist

Discovering an artist after his work has already been curated in such vaunted venues as The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institute and the White House Collection of American Crafts among others, often means that acquiring his work will probably be out of reach for most of us.   Fortunately for us, works by  Bennett Bean, noted ceramicist, sculptor and painter who brought his unique sensibility to textile design in collaboration with Elizabeth Rand, remain very accessible.

Last week The Museum of Art and Design (MAD)  feted Bean on the occasion of  the introduction of a collection of area carpets   that were commissioned by the museum in honor of its inaugural.  The limited edition collection, "9 for 09", which was unveiled at ICFF,  is exclusively available through The Store at MAD. 

 

Although he has worked in a variety of media and one of his minimalist sculptures is in the Whitney's permanent collection, Bean is most recognized for his ceramic arts.  With influences ranging from Japanese and Native American pottery to the works of  English potter Bernard Leach,  Bean works in the vessel tradition.  Pit-firing earthenware vessels, he uses a variety of techniques to apply elaborate decorative motifs post-firing, producing masterful works of complex form and color.

The "9 for 09" collection was inspired by Bean's ceramic works with mesmerizing motifs of color that appear to overlay the ground in successive layers.    Available in three designs, in two colorways each, the carpets are 100-knot Tibetan silk and wool and are offered in both 5' x 7' and custom sizes.  

For a limited time, a number of the ceramic pieces which inspired the collection will also be available through The Store at MAD.

If you're in the area and  haven't  yet visited MAD,  which is located on Columbus Circle in Manhattan, this is certainly a good reason to plan that outing.

 

In the Pink - Hot Colors On the Court and At Home

If you're a fan of  Grand Slam  tennis,  as I am, you've undoubtedly noticed how pervasive hot pinks and oranges are on the clay courts of Roland Garros  at this year's French Open.

Always a court style-setter, Serena Williams, who is also a fashion designer  with her own Anares lines of clothing and accessories,  has been turning up for her singles matches in a bright orange and black dress, and for doubles in a hot pink outfit.  Other players, including Li Na and Nadia Petrova, are wearing the colors  as well.   Even men's draw favorite and four-time defending champion Rafael Nadal  has been sporting hot pink shirts this year, both on the court and at his off-court press conferences. 

If you're looking to dress your home in Grand Slam style,  there's plenty to go around.  Fabrics and trimmings in these hot colors abound in the market this year.

From left to right:  Pierre Deux Trimmings and Vincente Wolf Collection fabrics from Kravet, Perennials leathers from Edelman and lots of hot brights from Pollack Associates.

Nelson's Nursery on "Living in Color with Sonu"

An admitted color junkie, even in the beige-est of times,  I am an avid follower of Sonu Mathews' blog, "Living in Color with Sonu."  

So imagine how pleased I am to see this post about the color rich, nautically themed nursery I designed for the winners of Similac's (Abbott Nutrition) Custom Nursery Design Contest.

Sonu Blog

http://livingincolorwithsonu.typepad.com/sonu_blog/2009/05/meaningful-color-and-design.html

You can see some photos of the nursery in the "Nelson's Nursery" photo album here.

A Twist on the Traditional - Lighting by Michael McHale

With ICFF  2009 getting underway, I've been thinking about some of the great design finds discovered there.  Way up on my list is the fabulous lighting by Michael McHale Designs, which takes the traditional crystal light fixture in a whole new direction.  

Combining the most ordinary and extraordinary in each hand-crafted fixture, industrial materials and refrigerator bulbs are joined with the sparkle and grace of Swarovski crystals to create chandeliers, table lamps and a new line of sconces that are as commanding as they are interesting.

I love pieces that tell a story.  When I first met Michael, a former entertainment lawyer, he was sourcing distressed brass pipes and fittings from the destruction of Katrina for the "bones" of his fixtures.   He continues to repurpose materials from Katrina sites in Mississippi and Louisiana, as well as building sites here in New York.   All of the fixtures are assembled locally.  Michael is hands on, doing much of the work himself with UL-certified wiring handled in Queens. 

You can see Michael's lighting in Manhattan at Desiron in SOHO and StudioMix on Madison Avenue and 30th Street.  Trust me, it's worth a look!

 

Great Modular Open Storage from Phase

In recent years, the West Coast pops up more and more frequently on my radar screen when I 'm looking for  something new in furniture design. Some of the more delightful pieces I've seen have been designed by Reza Feiz of Phase Design in Los Angeles. 

I often find that modern furniture, while wonderful to look at with its clean bold lines,  can be cold.  Not so with Feiz's pieces.  His choice of richly detailed woods and bold use of color make his contemporary furnishings read unexpectedly warm - so much so that, at first glance, you almost miss the stark simplicity which gives them their strength.  

I love this stackable storage unit assembled from Phase's Ally cubes and think they are perfect for children's and informal family rooms.  Available in black, white and a variety of custom colors,  they are easy to integrate into your space plan and color scheme while providing great functionality.

Phase Design will be in Booth #1044 at ICFF.