Hanging Around The House: My Office

A while back pal Gwenda tried to convince people to do photo-tours of their homes.

I tried to shoot some pictures for something like that, but I found that I couldn’t take pictures that showed things the way I want to show them.

However, it did inspire me to do a series showing the various pieces of artwork, etc., that I have hanging on the walls around the place.

I’ve just taken quick digital snaps of each piece (so don’t expect really fine images) and I’ll give a few comments. The posts will just have thumbnails, that will link to much larger versions of the images.

I plan to include pieces that are “mine”, and pieces that Trish and I have found together, but not include pieces that are solely Trish’s (with one exception, which is too cool to skip). She makes me hang some stuff in the garage after all.

So, we’ll start the series in my office. There’s not a lot of room to hang stuff in my office: three of the four walls are covered in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and the fourth wall is a giant photomural of a tropical garden. (There are no windows, as sunlight is not great for the books, so I wanted the mural to give me a sense of outsideness.) I won’t show you the mural now, primarily because there’s no way to frame a shot that doesn’t reveal the embarassing state of my office.

Even with all the wall taken up, I have managed to sneak a couple of things in.

For example, on the door to a rarely used storage closet I’ve hung my print of Rembrandt‘s Philosopher Reading:

I had a print from one of those cheesy poster shows at university, which I took to my favourite framing expert in Waterloo. She took it, and mounted it with a canvas textured surface, and then put in the the snazzy wooden frame you can see there. There’s no glass, so you can see the canvas texturing. When I finish the “reading room”–currently the only unfinished room in the house–I’ll probably move this in there and hang it over the comfy chair.

The other thing I managed to sneak in, is on one of the long walls. I have a 24-foot wide floor-to-ceiling run of shelving along the wall, and that doesn’t quite fill the wall. At the end there is a 4 or 5 foot section of open wall. I’ve set a lovely shorter, free-standing, walnut bookcase there and filled it with some comics, including all the collected editions of Alan Moore‘s work. In the wall space above that I have my signed portrait of Moore (signed by Moore and the photographer Jose Villarrubia). It’s a very cool image, which is a kind of spooky portrait when viewed straight on. If you move slightly off center, an overlay of mystic circles and writing appears. I’ve tried to take the snap so that you can see the overlay as well.

You can see the tops of the top row of Moore collections at the bottom of the image. This piece was framed up by my Halifax framing dude, who did a great job.

I’ll try to cover the other rooms over the next little while.