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Written by Melanie Reese
Apr 15th, 2020 • 9 minute read
Apr 15th, 2020 • 9 minute read
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The Weekly Curation: WFH
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For our inaugural Art in Res curatorial initiative, we’ve asked Art in Res artist and independent curator Mel Reese to curate a weekly collection of our artists’ work to hang in a variety of your potential Work From Home spaces and environments. Taking conference calls from the bathroom now? Your bedroom is now doubling as a meditation retreat? Lucky enough to have your own private home office? Whatever your WFH situation, each week we’ll deliver the perfect curated picks to bring some beauty and joy to your new indoor world.
Though you may already have art throughout your home, it’s exciting to see how each piece interacts as a whole - and to imagine your own budding curated collection of fine art! While Mel envisions how each piece works in a different room, scroll to the bottom to see how they come together in a thoughtful, coalescent collection, and read Mel’s curatorial insights and tips on how to curate your own.
Let Mel lead the way. Happy browsing!
Art for your living room / The “I have too many papers and they are everywhere” room
With this gathering of girls, each clad in a vibrant swimsuit, we’re reminded of the golden days before social distancing. We think of our friends, swimming pools, and long evenings in the hot summer sun. The piece is colorful, vibrant, busy, and exciting - everything you need to spruce up the living room. As a larger piece, it can take up visual space in your home, joyfully dominating a wall in your main living area. Bringing these girls into your space adds a human comfort - another familiar face to brighten your day.
As you can see from the rich green fronds behind her subjects, artist Maddie Stratton is a figurative painter and illustrator native to New Orleans, LA. Maddie has been making art for as long as she can remember and her interests lie in blurring the lines of what it means to be human. Through vibrant colors in her paintings, Maddie attempts to homogenize the hierarchy of subject matter; the human subjects share the stage with the flora and fauna. Her paintings are derived from a patch-work of source materials, creating imaginative, everyday scenarios.
Art for your eating area / “This is the only table I have in my entire apartment so this is where I live now” area
Adding this piece to your dining area is like adding another window to your apartment, with a permanently beautiful view. At 20” x 16” this is also the perfect size to hang over your dining table. The landscape and portrayal of nature is a nice balance and foil to the interior where we are now perpetually stuck. With warm colors, the piece is calming and hopeful, and viewing red even makes us hungry!
Art for your bathroom / The “I desperately need a quiet place to take this important call” room
This funny, airy piece is perfect for a smaller space. With bright smiles and big eyes, the almonds make sure you never have to feel lonely during your alone time. When you brush your teeth in the morning, you can feast your eyes on their joyful little smirks and delicious googly eyes. It’s a piece that reminds us to enjoy the simple pleasures and to take a moment everyday, just to smile.
Artist Dan Bina’s work addresses themes of identity, media, culture, gender, and commerce. Through his pieces, Dan examines social media, human desire, and the advertising languages that market ideas, individuals, and products. He sometimes paints plein air just to keep a nice tan.
Art for your kitchen / The “I am tired of sitting and staring at my computer screen so now I am standing and staring at my computer screen” room
With bright colors and big bold shapes, this piece is plain old fun. As our days evolve, kitchens become more important. It’s the place throughout the day where we pause whatever worries us to prepare food for ourselves and maybe the ones we love. It’s a place inside our homes that is filled with purpose, good smells, the sounds of sizzling oil. All that is to say, it’s a nice place, comforting, and somewhat unchanged. And it deserves a little love. The movement and color of this piece bring vibrancy and inspiration to the kitchen, a creative space, reminding us to follow our own inspiration rather than strictly the recipe.
As a painter, Niki Kriese employs both sophistication and humor honed from a lifetime of material experimentation. Her work uses surprising movement and color combinations to draw the viewer in and also create distance. With an interest in creating space through light, scale and drawing, she has pulled visual elements from neighborhood gardens, skate parks, mountainous peaks, suburban interiors, secluded ponds.
Art for the entry way / The door you now stare at longingly hoping to walk through but can’t
Our relationship with the front door has changed. It’s now a barrier to a more frightening world, but also a fantasy for a time after all of this. Someday, we’ll walk through the door and go do all the things we miss - eating at restaurants, going to museums, taking a long walk in the park with friends.
This is a space in our homes that now deserves a little love. Something to stare at that isn’t just an unopened door. This is a beautifully quiet piece, subtle, and light. It’s perfectly sized for that small space between the front door and a nearby closet or window, that may have been awkwardly bare before. It can fill the space and bring warmth to otherwise neglected areas of the home. Within the work, traditional layering of paint and color gives a sense of calm and order. It’s a piece that says “I was always supposed to be here.” It’s beautiful and understated, a piece that reminds of the simple joys of life and of comfort, consistency - of home.
Art for the study / That desk that faces a wall in a room with no windows, and that you’ve had to unearth from a pile of random crap in order to use as a desk for the first time ever
With its straightforward imagery, this piece is soothing, beautiful and complex in its perceived simplicity. It’s a piece that brings zen to a space of production, creation, and work. And god, do we need zen right now. With creamy white and black together, the painting is easy on the eyes, something nice to concentrate on against otherwise plain walls. Through its minimalist expression, the piece creates complexity in how we view it, how we interact with something so immediate - our eyes meditatively tracing the movement of the paint, learning more about it the longer we look. It reminds us to spend more time engaging with that which we feel we already know.
Through calligraphy pens and brushes, bamboo stick and pastels, sumi ink and watercolor, Gianfranco forever captures a precious moment in time with the stroke of his hand. There's a combination of minimal balance, movement, and seductive emotional gestures in his chosen colors and fully focused lines. The scheme of his painting invites the observer to move into an unknown space that activates our deep, hidden, and sometimes forgotten memories. Gianfranco speaks to the turbulence inside of us. “I literally never plan. I try to stay with the moment. It’s kind of like a meditation. I try to ground myself in the moment and appreciate everything. Even the spots that are all over the place, they are part of the big picture." That comes from Zen philosophy, to accept all the parts of what we are and that we have basically no control. He adds, “It is hard to overcome fear and be sincere with oneself. Freedom is possible only through self-acceptance.”
Art for the bedroom / The “I need a break from screens” room
Now more than ever, bedrooms are a haven and a personal sanctuary. As we lay in bed, we take in the piece’s size and texture, grounding our brains in a calming image, allowing ourselves to be in touch with reality in our coziest place. The painting feels modern, while also evoking the impressionist master Monet’s approach to landscape scenes. Whatever time of day we decide we need to curl up under the covers, to take a moment for ourselves, this painting is soothing and beautiful, layered color combinations stirring something inside ourselves.
Karin’s paintings are made of multiple layers of acrylic paint, before she carves back into the built-up surface with woodcarving tools. This process of sedimentation and erasure, covering and uncovering, transforms the layers of paint into three-dimensional woven textures. She intuitively carves and chips away the surface, revealing layers and hidden images underneath. Her practice is much like that of an archeologist, excavating the surfaces of her paintings to expose fragments of time.
Bringing it together
On curating the collection: As we ramp up the weekly curated selections, I wanted to talk about how and why I brought these pieces together. These will cover the basics all collectors, both experienced and new to the game alike, can consider when viewing art. I am excited to share new perspectives every week.
Color: This week I’ve gone with a variety of greenish blues, turquoise notes, and white, with black punctuation throughout all the pieces. Even though the look of each piece of art is different, we can see how they come together beautifully as a collection via a curated eye.
Size and scale: To view a collection as a whole in a home, you want to always consider sizing. It’s important to incorporate works across all sizes and scale. Sizing applies to the physical size of the canvas or paper, while scale will apply to the forms and shapes within the image itself. The variety and combination of small and large is exciting in it’s differentiation, while having a cohesive feel when they come together as a whole.
Subject matter: One of my favorite things to discuss in curating a home collection! You can see all kinds of subject matter in these pieces, from human figures to totally abstract. This is just the way I like it. Don’t be afraid to mix up figurative, narrative, still life, and abstraction in your home collection. Each piece has a different subject matter, giving it special focus within the group. All the works interact with one another in exciting ways. We view individual pieces of art differently when put into a collection. We see new line and form relationships within abstractions when paired with figurative works or new stories in narrative pieces paired with still life. Let the works subject matters lend themselves to each other, building a story throughout your burgeoning collection.
Mood: Another big, fun element to focus on in personal taste! Some pieces are more upbeat or loud, while others feel reserved or quiet. Like anything in life, collecting is all about cohesion and balance.
Materials: I’ve included a variety of materials here as well. All are water-based media like acrylic paint, water color, and ink - yet each painterly in their own right. Beyond painting tools, don’t be afraid to combine works on canvas and framed works on paper. Variety and thoughtful curation is key!
With these new viewing tools in hand, happy collecting!
Curated by Mel Reese
Zhuzh by Emily Berge