Trying my hand at wall art

I finished three projects last Sunday. This would be impressive except that I’d been working on them for some time, it was really just that day that I could slap all the pieces together and make the end result look intentional. Projects are like that. You figure out your idea or bang, it smacks you in the head. Gather the materials, do the prep, work on the pieces and finally, put it together.

I did a lot fewer projects when I was younger because I didn’t have the patience to work through the process all the way. These days I really am about 50/50 on process/result. Sometimes I get impatient and just want it done–instant gratification is a hallmark of growing up in suburban consumer culture, doncha know! But I’m finding more and more that even if things turn out like crap, sometimes it’s the doing and the learning that really makes it worthwhile.

But I don’t think this turned out like crap. I mentioned this one a few days ago, it’s called a piacere because literally it’s letters that spell out a piacere. I’m still a musician at heart, and so it was really only appropriate that I chose this musical term.

It means that the player can perform the music at her/his discretion with regard to tempo in particular, but more in general to just play the piece according to their own inclination. If you follow the link you’ll see the definition and the various related words (rubato, ad libitum).

I chose the term as a nod to the way I think I like to do things – in my own way. Of course, we can’t in general do the things we want to do how we want whenever (darn!).  But I try.  So the materials I chose were from things I found around my house that I had kept as memories of things.  The A’s were music: the one on the left contains pieces from a postcard of a page in a medieval antiphonal, then I imitated the painting style for the rest.  I have pieces of medieval music and chant on the sides.  Medieval music and manuscripts were my favorite part of graduate school.

So about the pictures – Jeff dislikes picture frames sitting about everywhere, so I have to get creative in the ways that I have pictures in the house.  Since the whole thing is really about life, and the fun you can have living it, why not?  The P is a picture from the Central Park exhibit The Gates with a picture of Jeff and I looking out at the statue of Libery.  The I is for my brother, though bamboo is just fun to paint.  The nonprofit Pandas International has been sending me updates on the damage from the earthquake in China – the whole area is still not doing so well – that’s been a really sad story to hear.

The C is pictures of the Cloisters Museum, an entirely medieval-oriented museum in far north Manhattan. The E is from the Maker Faire last year (the picture below from SXSW interactive – nerd-E!!), the R is about all my hiking, and the E … well, I just love flowers.  And I love New Orleans, and there I am at Cafe du Monde.  I was pretty worried about New Orleans this past week. I grew up in Houston, so there were always hurricanes, and bad ones are always a real struggle and worry.

OK, now to stop with the reminiscences. I thought that was a fun project – got to try out some new paints, it was meaningful to me as well as autobiographical, and it’s nice to see in my front hallway.