Hanging Around The House 11: Laundry Room & Garage

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.

OK, we’re almost done now. One or two more entries to go to complete this tour. This segment will focus on two areas: the laundry room (which is also the entrace to the house if you come via the side door and garage), and the garage itself–the area to which certain of my things have been exiled by my Lovely Wife.

There are only two pieces in the laundry room at present, although there is a lovely stretch of open wall over the washer & dryer that is just calling out to me to fill it with something.

Over the security system keypad, beside the door to the garage you will find this:

This is an ink illustration of a scene from Howard‘s Solomon Kane stories. This is a Jeff Jones piece (we’ve seen a lot of those before, in the halls, the bathroom, and a couple in the bedroom). This might be my all time favourite Kane illustration (at least to date). And yes, I have seen Gary Gianni’s Solomon Kane pieces–I prefer this.

Beside the other door, the one entering the hallways inside the house, has this hanging beside it:

This is piece by Jenny Holzer, a selection of what later became the Truisms project.

I bought that at a poster show when I was in first year university (and note the extremely um…. frugal framing style, which also dates to that same period) and it served as the seed for all kinds of late night sophomoric argumentation. Sometime I should do a post on my curren take on these statements. You should be able to read the statements all clearly if you click through to the larger image.

Moving into the garage, we find a lot of plaque-mounted posters and prints hanging on the walls. Some were exiled to the garage because Herself thought they were scary, like this Eric J image of the Duke of Lorraine–apparently fresh from some appalling dark ritual–from Rex Mundi:

Just beside that is a Michael Kaluta image entitled “The Abyss“. I’m not sure why this one got exiled to the garage:

The single largest thing I have hanging on the walls anywhere is the giant promotional poster for Frank Miller‘s Sin City: Family Values. Since the Sin City movie came out, I get a lot fewer questions about this thing. It’s a single image that’s printed across three full-size posters. I had the three plaque-mounted together, forming one giant piece. I couldn’t fit in my car to get it home from the framing shop, and had to have a friend with a van bring it for me. It’s about three feet high, and runs around six feet in length. It has a special supporting frame around the perimeter, since the surface is large enough that the board it’s mounted on runs into problems with its own weight.

I used to have it hanging over the couch in my house in Waterloo. When Trish and I first started discussing moving to a new house, one of her first “non-negotiable” rules was “That thing is not hanging in my house.” I believe she may have thought I was kidding when I asked if it could hang in the garage. I wasn’t.

Also pretty large, about the size of a large-format movie poster, is this promotional poster for the single “State of Mind“, by Fish. I was pretty heavily into Marillion, and later the solo career of lead singer Fish, during high school, and I’ve never really gotten over it. Yes, that’s right, I like progressive rock. Bite me.

One other consequence of my Marillion obsession was that I became quite a fan of the air-brushed images of Mark Wilkinson. This poster is one of several dozen Wilkinson/Marillion–Fish images I have on posters, but this is the only one that I ever had plaque-mounted. (And, I never did have Wilkinson imagery tattooed on myself, unlike at least one of my high school crushes.)

This one is just in the garage because of size–it’s too big to hang casually inside the house, and while I like it, I don’t like it enough to dedicate a room to it.

And yes, that is the end of the big-ladder-what-hangs-in-the-garage that is poking into that picture.