Modern Artworks

Long time with no posts. Excuses aside, it's been a crazy month, I'm now unemployed, and I should have plenty more time to post more regularly. Upcoming posts will feature 'MCM furniture finds', the concrete front porch I poured out front, the complete bathroom remodel we recently completed, and the lurking studio remodel that's currently gutted and in need of a new roof. I thought it might be nice to switch it up a bit and explore the various pieces of MCM art we've acquired and one we made over the past year.

Our first introduction to Mid Century Art was simple, Charlie Harper. As soon as we realized our modern furniture collection was just the beginning in our house, I bought our first Charlie Harper print, Praying Mantis 2, for Wendy's birthday in 2005. After collecting several of his prints we realized we needed to expand our horizons, though I'd be perfectly fine with only Harpers in the house. The first piece, 'Laguna Aurora' is a serigraph I bought at a local auction house downtown. I walked by this place daily and this print jumped off the wall of artwork at me. The print is 10/60 and the artist's name I still have yet to identify. It's either 'Deinstag' or 'Dreustag', but the cursive signature is not legible. Anyone have any ideas? The colors on this and graphic simplicity currently make this my favorite piece in our house.

The second piece I picked up recently is this small oil on canvas painting. It looks as if it was a college students work with the self made frame. The frame is painted wood very rougly nailed to the stretched canvas. Obviously, we veer towards abstract graphical type of work. We also like sculptural objects, we were overwhelmed by tedious repetition at the recent Tara Donovan exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center downtown. Nonetheless this piece is signed 'Robert Walder or Walden', November 1971 on the back, so period appropriate. I actually found an artist in NYC Robert Walden Jr. who suggested it might be his father's work, but it ended up not being his work after a few emails. I'm still in the dark on this artist, but the piece works great adjacent to the front two toned grey wall, the colors are almost exact.

The final piece is a recent installation Wendy and I came up with while cleaning out the office for demolition. The piece is simply two weathered copper panels juxtaposed on a seafoam colored wall that anchors one end of our large dining / living space. Daily, the sun caresses an array of reflection and color off the pieces. Quite often at dinner I find myself seeing a beach wave crash to shore or a mountain range lurking through the mist. It often inspires a dinner discussion, there's always a different interpretation by different people.

The humorous part is I almost took these panels to the metal scrapyard to be cashed in for their weight. These use to be orchid trays filled with gravel, and over the years the bottoms oxidized slightly and created the complex visual seen in the closeup. When I was cleaning them out and hosing them off outside, the weathered underside of them was discovered. After several mock-up configurations, including a couple angular and vertical ideas, we decided to let the sloped ceiling counter the horizontal shift of the two panels. Viola, trash turned to treasure.