January Journal: Art on display

[liv]

Another excellent prompt from ephemera: What sorts of art you do you have on display in your space?

For ages I never really got round to having displayed art. I remember when khalinche came to visit and commented that my current place has loads of potential for doing something interesting with the decor. But in fact, it's mostly remained potential, because I can't really be bothered to think about beautifying my living space. Clean and tidy and convenient is all I really care about.

I have quite a lot of owl ornaments dotted around the place; I inherited my grandmother's owl collection and I make a habit of buying an owl as a souvenir of each place I visit. This stops me from going wild buying tourist tat, because I'm always looking for one specific thing. People observe that I have quite a lot of owls around the place and offer me further owl ornaments and pictures and owl-themed stuff as presents :-) Also each owl has a story to it.

I also have a bunch of stuff that hatam_soferet has made for me, because she's my artist friend and nearly everything pretty in my house comes from her. Everything from a pebble with tiny ladybirds crawling on it, made from painted lentils, to an amazing wall-clock that she put together out of an old circuit board. I have a small amount of Judaica nice enough to display, some modernist silver candlesticks that my Swedish community gave me as a thankyou present, my grandmother's peacock-design chanukiah, things like that. I also have a couple of pictures I keep meaning to put up that I haven't got round to framing, a pseudo-Impressionist landscape painted and given to me as a present by an elderly man I knew at synagogue, and a really cool owl picture by a contemporary artist my sister knows.

When we got married we asked people for art, if they wanted to give presents. And that has gone a long way to kick-starting me into having actual art in my life, rather than just assorted ornaments. A cousin who is an artist gave us a nude she'd painted herself. My Aussie uncle gave us a pencil drawing of a wombat (currently in jack's house while we're living apart). pseudomonas, darcydodo and hatam_soferet clubbed together to buy me my Stoke owl, a full-scale replica of the Mediaeval brown and yellow owl jug that's the centrepiece of the local museum's ceramic collection.

By a mile, the most exciting art I have in my space is hatam_soferet's beautiful beautiful marriage contract. We commissioned her to make us something a little bit like the traditional ketubah, but with our own secular text because we're not Jewishly married. It is the most breathtakingly amazing thing I have ever owned; I love it partly because my best friend made it in honour of my marriage to my husband, but it's also seriously beautiful aside from the sentimental value, because hatam_soferet is really really talented and I'm not just saying this because she's my dear friend.

I meant to put photos in this post, but I've ended up writing it in rather a hurry to make sure to complete my daily quota. So I may come back and add some images rather than just boring verbal descriptions at some point.

[January Journal masterlist. Anyone want the last empty slot?]

Comments

[forthwritten]

Oh my goodness, your marriage contract is stunning - both the promises you made and the gorgeous design. The leaves! The colours! The little animals! It's gorgeous.

[ephemera]

oh, that is a truly beautiful marriage contract, in words, thoughts, design, and execution - tiny owl! tiny cat! That beautiful lettering!