Hanging Around The House 7: Family Room

Continuing the series of posts that try to capture the various pieces of art I have hanging around the house. Remember that these posts are made up of quick snapshots–these are hardly professional images, and the upstairs images are worse than the downstairs ones since the angles I could use to take the snapshots are much more highly constrained. The images in the post link to larger images.

There’s not much in the family room, artwise. It does have one double-height walls that we’re planning to fill someday with either an honest-to-God tapestry, or with the giant version of the metallic leaves we have in the foyer.

One corner of the room does have a couple of framed pieces. These are original works that Colleen Doran did to illustrate the Delia Sherman story, “The Tragedy of King Alexander and Stag.” I bought these from Colleen, who had already framed them as you see here, in late 2004. (Colleen still has these items listed on her site so you can see her comments.)

Here’s a bit of detail–as much as you can get with a quick snapshot:

(I have 3 or 4 other pieces of Doran original work in my “original comic art” folder, including a really great page from Orbiter, but this series is about things that are actually up on the walls.)

The other piece of art in the family room, and it is the dominant piece, is the very large framed photograph that hangs over the fireplace mantle. It looks like this:

That’s a picture of me, standing in the Larch Valley meadow, high above Morraine Lake in the Valley Of The Ten Peaks. (This is near Lake Louise, in the Banff National Park.)

I was visiting my friend Dave, who lived in Calgary at the time, and he took me on this hike, from Morraine Lake, up to Larch Valley, and then on to Sentinel Pass. There are some pretty amazing sights to be seen as a reward for hauling yourself up the mountain.

Dave took this picture on a disposable panoramic camera–this was back in the day when the disposable panoramics actually used physically larger negatives than the standard format or APS negatives used, so the image can be blown up to this size (about 3′ by 2′) and still look crisp and clean. (I have another print of a photo I took on this hike, made the same size and framed the same way, that you will see in a later entry.)

If you look at the large version, you can see a slight hint of the fact that at the time I had belt-length hair, which is gathered into a ponytail and hanging behind me in this picture.