Happy Easter!

Semi creepy (considering) Sharon Tate Easter photo via Girlfriday 2 by way of Flickr, one of my favorite mysterious random image collectors!

Raggedy Ann Eyelashes...

After a few weeks of nonstop house hunting and catching up on long overdue projects, we were super excited to set aside a leisurely weekend last week to run around town taking in all of our friends newer, bigger, better gallery spaces, and ringing in the month long Robert Altman fest at the Portland Art Museum NW Film Center with a screening of one of my favorite movies of all time:



Brewster McCloud! I've been toting around a decaying video store copy of this film for decades, eventually upgraded to the laserdisk, but have never, never seen it on the big screen!

With an original screenplay written by Doran William Cannon, who was also responsible for another top ten favorite, Otto Preminger's "Skidoo," and starring the always perfect Mister Bud Cort and the magical, elvin and otherworldly Miss Shelley Duvall (Probably my number one vintage muse - as you can probably tell by the girls that I paint! Spider lashes, bunny teeth and ears poking out of stick straight hair? Check, check and check!) in her first ever movie role, personally discovered by Altman, who had this to say about his first impression:

"When I first saw her, she had painted long eyelashes on her face, and I thought "Here is a girl who is trying to make me think she is a Raggedy Ann doll." It was only years later that I realised that she WAS a Raggedy Ann doll."







Images and quotes via the Shelley Duvall and Brewster McCloud fan sites, both of which are amazing resources for interviews, articles, and ephemera about the film.

Check out the NW Film Center website for the rest of the festival calendar, maybe we'll see you there!

Crack in the Cosmic Egg Lamp...

Via Centre de Recherche sur les Arts du Feu et de la Terre by way of France Magazine by way of Design-Milk, I'm now completely obsessed with this Ingo Maurer porcelain Broken Egg lamp from 1996:



I can totally picture it in our new place, perched high atop the Kraut section of the record shelves!

Boating Stripes and Bow Ties...

The first of the imminent deluge of David Hockney inspired Spring editorials is out!




From Another Man Magazine
Starring and Set Design by Gary Card
Photography by William Selden
Styling by Nicola Formichetti

There's also a childrens version!




From Milk Magazine

Via Style Bubble, Diane Pernet, Sarah Colette

Now it's going to be even more impossible than ever to find a pair of those glasses (My first and favorite prescription, they fell apart in the mid 90s and I've been searching for the perfect pair again ever since) again! Though I suppose I could also shell out for the surely forthcoming Paul Smith version? Sigh...

Recent Acquisitions...

We've been finding entirely different categories of super common cute vintage stuff in the Northwest and have been accidentally starting lots new collections in the process... Oops!

Like adorable hand carved wooden owls:

(Note: the one with pink felt googly eyes was $1 and according to it's reluctant previous owner "about to be firewood!")

And booth upon booth of 70s novelty steins:


The gonk era Magic Mountain stein with a wizard for a handle is one of my new favorite things of all time!

Cute Clutter vs. Creative Chaos...

So we're officially house hunting again as of a bit later this month (Hoping for one of the last huge adorable affordable houses in all of Portland!) and it has me thinking a lot about studio decor and studio practice, since this is the first time besides a handful of ill advised moves to the Midwest in search of a) the easy life and b) bargain basement rents on giant crumbling Victorians (Done and done, by the way!) that I could potentially have room (We've spotted triple car garages and basements and woodshops galore!) to spread out and actually create the kind of space that I'm convinced is totally necessary for happy, stress free art making! I can't wait!

Left to my own devices, my creative spaces usually teeter wildly on a scale somewhere between the (barely) organized chaos of Francis Bacon:



Marie and Marie (via Ester Krumbachová, quite possibly the most amazing Art Director/Set/Costume Designer of all time) :



or Julie Verhoeven:




The slightly less unruly creative cacophony of Yoshitomo Nara:



or Sofia Coppola:



Or (ideally) the cute clutter of Victoire de Castellane:

J'adore Trompe l'Oiel...

I can't even begin to describe how much I adore the use of trompe l'oiel in fashion and how often I've snuck a printed sailor collar or faux bow tee into many a collection, which makes the latest from Sonia Rykiel pretty much my new favorite thing ever:

Semi-reminiscent of those ever-covetable vintage Roberta di Camerino dresses:

And of course the magical Miss Elsa Schiaparelli, who most surely started it all with these sweaters:

...in the 1920s, no less!

Some other recent favorites in the genre are these perspex bowties and be-bobbled peter pan collars by longtime favorites Tatty Devine:


And this assortment of translucent acrylic buttoned up Victorian finery from Paraphernalia: