photo: paul raeside
Spotted in a long post on Desire to Inspire showing work of interiors photographer Paul Raeside: walls with roughly painted stripes. Right up our alley: graphical, imperfect, charming, do-able…though perhaps not as easy as it looks (we’d practice first on some scraps sheets of plywood or walls we plan to paint over, or even heavy paper tacked on the wall). read more…
The image of a Khan market storefront in Delhi spotted on Ouno got us thinking about strangely beautiful walls of stacked logs can be. We’ve blogged some in the past, but recently found some new iterations of the great, elemental and possibly practical idea. Check out this chic wall in Alpenstueck restaurant in Berlin: read more…
pupilpeople.com
This evening marks the start of Chinese New Year – the Year of the Dragon. We think this poster from Singapore design firm pupilpeople would make a fine, fluid set of reminders for the year: glow-in-the-dark, too, for about $24. read more…
Last week Mondoblogo posted two photos taken at Art Basel of wonderful geometrically-painted walls with doors (they are part of the blog’s illuminating challenge to identify what is actual “art” and what is not). The top is “Final Cut” by artist Ernst Caramelle. The second “a random door”…
We’re putting them in our file of cool ideas for painting a room with a door. read more…
We discovered RydeSafe Reflective Bike Decals via Better Living Through Design and quickly pledged to the RydeSafe Kickstarter project. These great-looking decals were designed by Tonky, an artist from Brooklyn who was hit by car and set out to make something that would keep him and other bikers safe while riding at night. The stickers are made from a film that reflects light (called conspicuity film), and are made to fit bike rims and frames, as well as helmets and accessories. The effect is quite striking, and makes you impossible to miss.
We love the mix of design and safety, but also think that these would make a great gifts for kids. We’re imagining walls and toys and clothes read more…
A favorite way we’ve found to savor an artwork or image without owning it is simply to prop a book with the work open against a wall, on a shelf or sideboard or mantle. Every time we pass by or glance up, it is there for us to enjoy. When we tire of it, or become “blind” from seeing it frequently, we open the book to another page, or display another open book altogether.
We’ve found this is a great way to put ideas we want to remember in our field of vision…
For example, it allows us to have flowers in our place when no live ones are available or worth buying, like the begonia and sunflower, above, from Plant Kingdoms: The Photographs of Charles Jones… read more…
photo:mark sherwood + queensland art gallery
For an interactive installation at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, artist Yayoi Kusama created a totally white room as a palette for visiting children to embellish as they pleased with colored dot stickers; ultimately thousands of stickers were used, to make bulls-eyes, whorls, dribbles and overlapping hits of color. The results of this crazy-simple exercise in spontaneous design is the increasingly stunning transformation of the white room…a big lesson to our often white-stuck decorating heads. Check out the transformation from start to finish…
We forgot how great old-fashioned crepe paper streamers are for jazzing up a space until we stumbled pictures we clipped from Aesthetic Outburst ages ago: it’s an easy way to give a room charmingly festive atmosphere with a bit of “kid” in it. The magic is all in the colors you choose like this mix of hot pink
photo: ch'ng kiah kiean 莊 嘉強's photostream/flickr
One of our readers, Pippin, recently sent in us a photo she’d found on flickr, with the following message:
“someday (someday) i’m going to put canvas on a wall as wall paper, and then just paint stuff on it—layer after layer. an experimental wall.”
We love the idea of an experimental wall whether it be a sheet of canvas, heavy paper, fabric, sheetrock, whatever: a blank space to layer ideas – experiment – without any constraints on the outcome. read more…
We not crazy for headboards but find ourselves really liking the idea of a virtual headboard – painted right on the wall – that we recently stumbled on. When you want to change the style, just repaint… read more…
…by Dominique Falla, as an entry to this years Positive Posters competition:
For too long, people have viewed themselves as separate and I wanted to represent a multitude of individuals using the nails, and then coloured string to show how we are all interconnected, and that together, we can make something beautiful.
It kind of reminds us of an elaborate Cat’s Cradle...
…do-able at home even…with just some nail’s and string…
Related posts: posters on the ceiling!
jim jarmusch: ‘steal from everywhere’
sea differently
xkeep calm and carry on, now panic and freak out!x
“How-To Work Better” by Swiss artists Fischli & Weiss has long been one of our favorite manifestos: the reminder we need daily. We’d seen it all over the internet, and posted it as a sign long ago. We hadn’t realized that it was, in fact, an installation, painted on the wall of an office building in Zurich.
Imagine if, instead of advertising, bill-boards featured signs like this…or if building owners just took it upon themselves to paint (or stencil) their buildings a little differently…
via Swiss-Miss
Related posts: 12 rules for creating (almost anything)
diy: words on walls
ernst caramelle’s fab painted walls
rough painted brick walls
We spotted this charmingly painted wall of a Berber house in Ouno’s great post about the beautiful “broken” geometry of Berber rugs from the Beni Ourain region. We were intitially inspired by the idea of chalking or painting an image/pattern like this on the side of ANY building – a sort of mental d-i-y fantasy – when we got blown away by this bit of text about the rugs, which applies to so much else.
“this semi-controlled disorder is said to function as a talisman against evil and as a promoter of fertility. But it also seems to emanate from the nomadic culture’s more general tolerance of uncertainty, nothingness and change.”
The rug themselves offering curiously modernist designs to apply elsewhere, perhaps for painting fabrics, walls or floors. read more…
Ernst Caramelle/Mary Mary Gallery
Somewhere along the way we came across artist Ernst Caramelle‘s wonderful painted walls. They were actually installations in various art galleries: walls as artworks. We want to take them home, or the idea at least…paint some of our space in his fabulous fashion. We notice, that his color blocks can dramatically change the proportions of a room, as you’ll see from this riff of pictures we found on the Mary Mary Gallery website. read more…
We definitely have a thing for impermanent pop-up rooms within rooms and room dividers, mentally hacking all sorts of materials, tents, and scaffolding trying to fulfill our dream of a space that could be easily and instantly divisable. We also have a thing for cardboard. So when we stumbled on this photo of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s art installation, The Mirror of Judgment, with its labyrinth of fluid corrugated cardboard, our imagination took off with the wondrous possibilities. We discovered that you can buy 250′ rolls of 6′ or 7′ wide cardboard for about $90 at Uline*. We envisioned standing a roll on its end to make a pillar and unfurling it to make waves or rooms… read more…
