City of Roses...

My dad was in town for a couple of weeks recently, which gave us a great excuse to drive around up in the hills and explore some of the Portland sights we hadn't quite made it to yet, like the International Rose Test Garden in Washington Park... who could resist five acres of perfectly dew dropped experimetal blooms?

Oh hai...

Here's Maybelle sharing my obsession with late 60s / early 70s patchwork.

I really really want a huge collection of quilts made kind of exclusively by teenage girls in the 70s but they always seem to be the hardest to track down. This one has the most amazing bits of striped velveteen, candy colored denims and printed corduroy and is pretty much my new favorite blanket ever:

I wasn't made for these times...

Perennial flickr favorite Olga Saglo just posted an amazing link to the latest most magical time wasting device on all of the internets!

Without further ado, I present me, and my studio, circa 1969:

Disney Girls...

Some of you may remember seeing these "behind the scenes" sneak peeks that Jeff took at a photo shoot for a friends top secret book project last summer at my favorite ice cream stand in LA:




Now the secret is finally out! This weekend was the official release date of my dear (and dearly missed!) friend Miss Jennifer Brandt Taylor's magical new tome, Vintage LA!

"VINTAGE LA: Eats, Boutiques, Decor, Landmarks, Markets & More" is the ultimate travel and lifestyle guide for vintage fashion fans, Hollywood history lovers and cineastes alike. Jennifer, an L.A. native, takes you on a colorful tour of L.A.'s best vintage boutiques, restaurants, historic hotels, and movie palaces, as well as interviews L.A.'s most artistic residents. VINTAGE LA features dazzling Technicolor photography by Jeaneen Lund."

I always thought of Jennifer and her family as some of the last true Hollywood eccentrics, and will be forever grateful that they took me under their wing when I first arrived in Southern California and shared some of the most amazing secret hideouts in all of the land, so cracking open Vintage LA will surely have me pining for long lost Los Angeles in no time! I can't wait!

Oops...

I think I may have accidentally acquired a new eBay obsession...


Where have you been all my life Florentine enamel?

Home Sweet Home!

I only just realized that in all of the frenzy of the past few months, I had all but forgotten to post a few quick snapshots of our new place! Still very much a work in progress, originally dating from the 1800s and heretoforth known affectionately as the shed, it's an adorable outbuilding in a super central semi-historic neighborhood, a stable turned laundrette turned cute baby loft space and my new favorite thing ever... I secretly want to buy it and transform it into the vintage Disney set designer turned Storybook architect style faux English cottage of my dreams, half-timbering and all, but in the meantime:

Here is a beloved Princess Tina folkface pillow surveying its new surroundings...


The polished concrete floors still festooned with piles of winter rugs...


White stucco vintage brickwork and whitewashed original shingles...


Which are going to serve as perfect backdrops for all of our super colorful collections...


One of our favorite features is a row of skylights that extends through the living room and office areas...

I would love to rewire this area with all vintage globe lights, but alas, renting!

Oh, guess who else loves the skylights?


More to come as everything starts to come together, for now we're still unpacking, living in a sea of boxes, and considering a couple of summer garage sales when the sun finally comes out for good here!

"Pink Worlds and White Icing" at AfterModern SF

Hello everyone!
I have a 2 person show with Dana Carlson (one of my all time favorite contemporary painters!) on view this month at Aftermodern in San Francisco:

Pink Worlds (and White Icing)
An Exhibition of Recent Works by
Fawn Gehweiler and Dana Carlson

Opening Friday, May 23rd, from 6 to 8:30
On exhibit May 23rd through June 28th, 2008

Aftermodern Fine Art Gallery
445 Bryant Street
San Francisco

For more information please visit Aftermodern.com

About Pink Worlds:

Taking a cue from the show's namesake "Pink Worlds and White Icing", a collection of poems written by a 12 year old girl in late 60s, artists Dana Carlson and Fawn Gehweiler each present a collection of recent works that take a turn for the pastoral, pop and pretty, albeit with a dash of dark comedy thrown in for good measure. Awash in preteen nostalgia, strangely baroque and alternately naive, precocious, and deeply introspective, these tiny poems about "color, the Beatles, bubblegum, nature, and the universe" lend both a perfect title and a perfect backdrop to their respective candy colored dreamscapes and imaginary narratives of head-in-the-clouds teenage psychedelia.

Some installation shots taken just before the opening...

Some of my new stuff...

And last but not least...

Some great photos of the opening by Alan Bamberger, borrowed from Artbusiness.com!

Work in Progress...

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!