These three décor pieces were given to me by a friend who was moving and didn’t have room for them anymore. Originally they were offwhite balls with wire you could hang them by, and light bulbs running down into the balls to light them up. The plugs on the light cords were busted and I didn’t know how to fix them so I just tossed those parts and decided to use the balls by themselves. But to do that, they needed a little bit of spicing up.
I’d just found this gorgeous blood red paint and had some wonderful chrome spray paint left over. So I sprayed the balls with the chrome and did different things with the red. I love the clash of those two colors.
For the first one I flipped the ball upside down and poured the red on it, letting it glob and drip down. When it hangs, it looks like the red is slowly seeping up the sides.
For the second ball I put tape all over the piece in different shapes and lengths, then painted the entire piece red. While the red dried, I traced thru the wet paint with the blunt end of a paintbrush, which scraped off thin lines where the silver could show thru. Once the who thing dried, I removed the pieces of paint, letting the silver show thru where it had been covered. This layering technique is one of my favorites to do.
For the third ball I left it mostly silver and just did splashes and spatters of red.
All in all they’re a little creepy, violent even.
But I like them.
DMS did a homemade jewelry hanger from a pegboard a while back. Painted the peg board blue, gold, and this lovely melon color. I fell in love with the melon and blue together. One night I had a dream about blue and green bubbles and then I woke up and made this. All kinds of bright color and I love them together. I sell a lot of my paintings on my ETSY shop. And for each painting I make up a ridiculous story; you can see the one for PINK BUBBLES here. I think it’s fun. It’s loosely (looser than Heidi Fleiss) based on a true story. What do you think?
Music has been my nanny, friend and lover since a very young age. One of my first memories is both traumatic and incredibly silly, and has a lot to do, I think, with why music is important to me and the complex relationship I have with it. When I turned five I got a radio/cassette player for my birthday, along with the tape of the soundtrack to the movie La Bamba. The song La Bamba was one of my favorites (that riff! That exotic Spanish! So fun!). The day after my birthday I spent a good few hours on my front porch, the antenna of the radio pulled up as my microphone, listening to, dancing and singing along with, La Bamba. On repeat. For two or three hours. We lived in a house on a cul de sac at the bottom of a street that wound down a hill. Towards the end of my concert, I saw two men in white shirts slowly making their way down that hill towards our house, stopping at each door on the way. As they walked between houses they were watching me. (Notice if you will, the similarity between this and the stalking in my vision of In The Hall of the Mountain King). But I kept singing and dancing and rewinding. The closer they got the more they stared. Finally they left the house next to mine and were headed to my door (like all good Witnesses, walking the paved path back to the street, not cutting thru the grass). And as they came towards me they were smiling. They were laughing. Now I’ll grant you that in retrospect, a 5 year old white kid shaking his booty to La Bamba and singing “babababalabamba” at the top of his lungs is pretty effing cute and probably deservers a good hard laugh. But these guys were strangers and they were laughing at my concert. The five year old me did not take this well. I immediately broke into sobs and ran inside with my radio, screaming for mommy. I don’t think my mom wanted to talk with them anyway, and them breaking the heart of her little birthday boy didn’t go over well. Shall we say their visit to my home was not successful that day? After that, for the longest time, I was terrified to sing in public, or even to sing. I put all my music interests into instruments. And though I wrote songs throughout high school I never sang them. Singing has always been something I wanted to do, but I’ve had to force myself into nervewrecking situations to do it (even today I need at least three quick shots before I’ll put in for karaoke). I sing at home all the time, and am getting a bit more comfortable. But those effing Witnesses. I coulda been an American Idol.
One year after an anniversary dinner, me and my girl went shopping. Because that’s who we are. Got this piece at Artifaktori in Davis Square. Can’t recommend this place enough: had some great stuff (we both spent money the first time there and have both been back since); good clothes and a ton of really unique items. The staff has always been lovely. I found a jacket I really wanted but that was out of my reach. I pouted over it for the longest time while DMS tried on other things. Finally she was ready to go and so I gave it up as a lost cause. As she was buying I did some browsing around the counter and wouldn’t you know I found this amazing pink lizard pin hiding under some other pieces. Having been adamant about getting something, I suddenly found my match right as we were leaving. I bought it instantly. It’s since become one of my favorite pieces. Works well on a hat or lapel. I also sometimes pin it to a jacket/vest just about the pocket so it acts as a simple splash of color where a pocket square would typically go. Once or twice I’ve even put him in the pocket, wrapped up in a pocket square, so there’s just a flash of pink in the midst. Always fun, always a conversation piece.
Music has always been a huge inspiration for me, and an important part of my life. One of my earliest memories involves singing the hell out of La Bamba on my front porch at the age of 5 (see the full memory of that story in blog form soon). I was very fortunate to go to a school where music was part of the curriculum. One of the best things for me was a program called Music Memory, which was actually a competition (and oh how I love a competition). We would listen to pieces of classical music: Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Haydn, Tchaikovsky, etc. And we’d have to be familiar with the full piece we were studying, as well as able to identify the composer’s name, name of the piece, year it was written. We’d have these competitions where they’d play an obscure 30 second section of one piece and we’d have to recognize it and write down the info. Looking back it seems a bit of a strange way to get kids into music but it worked for me. When I was old enough I took up violin (which I played for 10 years and still hope to pick up again) and to this day I love orchestral and symphonic music. One of my favorite pieces from that program, and one that I have always had a huge emotional reaction to, is In The Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt, by Grieg. Took me many years to put together that this was actually incidental music for a play by Henrik Ibsen (and clearly if you’ve heard the song, it does not sound like incidental music!). Gaye Stearnes, my elementary school music teacher, often encouraged us to close our eyes when listening to music for the first time. I still remember that the minute this piece came on I had a story in my head: a man was walking up a narrow path through woods, up a hill or mountain. And every once in a while he would look back down behind him on the path. Listening, I saw this all very cinematically. Sometimes when the man looked back, he would briefly see a troll’s head poking out behind a tree, watching him. As he went higher, the troll got slowly closer. (Dude thinking of this while listening to the music still gives me chills). And as the music sped up, so did the chase until finally the man was sprinting uphill, running for his life. He finally came to a small clearing where the path out was blocked and he had to turn to face the troll, during the big huge choral sequence at the end of the song.
Honestly I don’t remember how this vision ended. I just remember the chase. At any rate, ever since that moment, this piece of music has been a huge part of my artistic DNA. It’s one of the pieces I go back to over and over whenever I feel stuck. It’s so sharp, it’s so dynamic, it’s so emotional and so exciting. Pretty much any time I’ve felt stuck, I’ll pull this out and a listen or two will get me out of my funk. Love it.
DMS is a big fan of chalkboard paint. (Check it out here!). When we moved into our old house there were two very big and uninspiring walls in the kitchen, covered with bland yellow. We didn’t know what else to do with them, so we thought we’d make them our chalkboards. It’s turned into a favorite part of the house. We found a great deep red chalkboard paint (official color name: Garnet) that went well with a dark brown we were using for other walls and accents. You can get tintable chalkboard paint at Home Depot; they have 12 colors! They also have pre-mixed "chalkboard black" and “chalkboard green” paint! It took 2 – 3 layers to really get the color on there (we didn’t use a primer, and you also want the color/paint to be thick so the chalk works well on it). Around the same time we went to Ikea for some other things and while we were poking around we found a couple of great items for the chalk wall: a great set of colored chalks. But just as cool, we found a mini-rack system with a wall-mounting rack that came with three silver pots/buckets with hangers to hook them over said rack. Not only did the silver go with some other things we had (mirrored furniture and the silver balls) but they looked great against the dark red of our chalkboard wall. And they’re a great storage spot for the chalk, and eraser, and a few other handy items.
The chalkboard wall is one of my favorite and most used parts of the house. We use it all the time. We keep a running shopping list on it. I also have a list of projects I’m working on (or want to), and DMS writes out quotes or phrases she hears and wants to remember. We also draw pictures and leave messages for each other.
Recently we’ve been using it to track goals: how many pounds we’ve lost on our diet; how many weeks I’ve gone without beer.
No matter where else I live in my life, I’ll definitely want to have a chalkboard wall. So much fun!
I used to be a manny in Cambridge MA, working with two awesome little guys, both of whom were adopted. Andrew was from Vietnam (you could tell, because he looked French), played cello, loved superheroes and coloring and legos, and had eyelashes long enough for a babelfish to tarzan swing from one ear to the other.
One day I had my camera out taking picture of something in the house to send to a repairman and Andrew was coloring at the table. When I finished I sat next to him but he was so into what he was doing, so still and quiet, I didn’t interrupt him. He was still enough I was able to get this super close-up shot of his eye. He didn’t even know I was taking pics. He’s got a beautiful eye and this is one of my favorite shots.
DMS loves some mirrors (and, um, gold). We had this 4’ mirror that I’d brought to the house from several previous places. The frame had busted off and it was cracked; fairly unusable. But I held onto it in the basement, thinking I might try something with it someday.
One day I was shopping at Target and found this great frame. It was black and they didn’t have other color options, but I wanted something to make the mirror pop a bit more. So I took it home and did a once-over with the gold spray paint.
I took the mirror and wrapped it in an old bedsheet I use as a paint tarp. Then I essentially beat it with a hammer, smashing the mirror into bits. That led to some great shapes, and kept all the small bits of broken glass in the sheet, so it was easy to clean up.
From there I tried to find a variety of pieces; mostly the bigger or medium sized bits. Using the frame’s backing (what you normally put back on after you put a picture in a frame; it locks into the frame itself to keep everything in place) as my base, I spread the mirror pieces out till I had a pattern I liked, starting with the three biggest pieces near the corners. Then I filled in the space between with slightly smaller pieces, and moved things till I was happy.
Once I had a design I was happy with, I used a hot glue gun to attach the mirror pieces to the backing, flipping and gluing them one at a time.
After the pieces had dried, I went over them one by one with Windex, and did the same with both sides of the frame’s glass.
Really happy with the end result. We hung it between two candelabras and it looks great with them lit. As with all mirrors it expands the way the room feels. And with the fractured pieces chopping the reflection up, it’s endlessly interesting, breaking up the reflection of my guitar, or our books, or me!
My name is John and I do a lot of things: - I wright plays (and sometimes direct them) - I paint and take photos - I write and record music - I bake like your mother's god. - I cook - I grow vegetables. - I craft and make puppets - I'm handy around the house (I once built a bed. A BED!) Frankly I'm a dog-gammed Reconnaissance Man. I'm a creator in Boston, trying my derndest to make a living with my art, because frankly I've never enjoyed doing anything else. This blog is going to talk about all those things I do, how and why I do them, what excites me and scares me, and what I'm doing next to make it work. I hope you'll check in. I hope you'll talk back to me. Maybe we can help or inspire each other. So question of the day: What inspired you today? Be well. JRex
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