Decorating With The Dead Skin, Bones and Shells as Symbols Honoring the dead with beauty, art and spirit Nature always wears the color of its spirits, said Ralph Waldo Emerson. And people have always decorated from nature. Caves in Lascaux, in the south of France, are decorated with depictions of horses by early hominids. Later, Egyptians painted Papyrus, sacred cats […]
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New Mayfair Supper Club, Belaggio Hotel, Las Vegas is the toast of the town–that’s what Town and Country Magazine wrote in its March, 2020 article about the new Vegas “Hot Spot”. Well, with the over-the-top and, somehow still classic, design of Martin Brudnizki, how could it be otherwise? One wouldn’t expect to see grand glass wall panels etched with jelly […]
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Seashells play a bigger part in decorating than one May imagine. Did you know that Limestone is made of Seashells? Marble is a more refined version of Limestone, so also contains compressed matter from the sea. It’s hard to imagine how much of our Earth was once under water, but finding seashell fossils in the Moroccan desert and […]
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With shock and dismay I see some pretty awful mid-century kitsch used in design today, and I guess it works in some instances. Shell kitsch, however, is so bad it’ll never be good. It’s the craftsmanship as well as the tastelessness of the stuff that makes it so awful. Vintage Shell Art When I tell someone that I make things […]
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Lots of seashell mirrors dot hallways and powder rooms all around town here, and all over Los Angeles, Long Island, New York City, Chicago… They serve an obvious and “safe” decorating purpose, and are practical. Using shells in an architectural setting can be interesting, and a little more of a surprise than a mirror or even a chandelier. I just takes a […]
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Plato suggested that, of course, Aphrodite (Venus in Rome) is nude because comtemplation of physical beauty allows the mind to understand and inspire intellectual love. Sounds like a line to me. Plato was in the hobby shop. In Sandro Botticelli’s Venus on the Half Shell (Nascita di Venere) is another sexy beauty nudely standing in the half-clam, with only her […]
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Ah, the Pearly Gates of Heaven. I’m thinking about them because I recently lost a dear friend, and am thinking that he is meeting St. Peter at those very gates. According to Revelations, the twelve gates of Heaven are each made from a single pearl. Of course this is symbolic, or the pearls were rather large (or the gates small..). […]
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When the Dutch started bringing seashells back from travels in the 1550’s, the use of them in art and science was born. Connoisseurs needed to be supplied with rare species for their Cabinets of Curiosity. Cabinets soon graduated to entire rooms, which appeared, with their magic, in Renaissance gardens, Louis XIV’s Grotto of Thetis at Versailles and Marie Antoinette’s shell […]
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