Art Space

Ten years ago I installed an Ikea Digniet wire in our dining room to provide a place to “hang my collection of ephemera.” When we got the dining room painted a few years ago, it got taken down, the wall repaired, and the ephemera went back into the archive.

But I saved the wire, and today Lisa and I hung it back up, this time in our front hallway:

From left to right, the pieces we’ve hung to start:

• A whimsical and very detailed drawing by Halifax artist Bruce Roosen.
• A bright, colourful monotype from Lisa’s recent experimenting in the print shop.
• A print I found in my archives from the late artist Sandy Hunter, a friend from my Peterborough days.
• An experiment in printing with wooden type that I printed in Serrazzano last spring.
• A colourful alphabet-on-black that surely must have come from Jackson Creek Press.

Meanwhile, around the corner at the bottom of the stairs, Lisa hung a framed version of my Furiously Curious print, using an inexpensive red frame from Ikea that complements it well:

And, while we were on an art-roll, Lisa suggested we retrieve a large painting from storage and use it to fill up a large empty space on our kitchen wall:

Behind all three of these hangings were slight eruptions of internal discomfort that I needed to quell.

I don’t like drilling holes into walls (it seems so permanent).

I don’t like that the fridge door can slam into the kitchen artwork.

That the front door opening can rustle the art-on-a-wire makes me nervous.

But what trumps those discomforts are the inarguable facts that they improve our living space significantly, and they allow us a place to see our own work, and those of our friends and familiars, out in the open.

(Lisa wrote a post—a much better one—about the same thing!)