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.
Picking up where we left off, if you keep going through the dining room, you come into the sitting room, more commonly known as “the purple room”, for reasons that should become obvious.
Continuing along the wall from where the fireplace wraps around, you come to this:
The rack is a mango and cast-iron thing we bought when we moved here, and it seemed very appropriate to put this image above it. I’m actually not sure where the image came from–I think it was a promotional poster that Trish picked up that we decided to plaque-mount, but I could be wrong. Looks good there, anyway.
Turning ninety degrees right, you are faced with this:
That’s a lovely scenery shot from The Burren. We traveled through there on our honeymoon, and when I saw this print in a shop I knew I wanted to have it for a souvenir.
Every time I look at that picture, I smell things. This is either because one of our weirdest honeymoon stops was at the Burren Perfumery, or because they are right about smell being most closely linked to memory.
(I wish I had seen something as nice of the Cliffs of Moher, because I’d like a reminder of that as well–the shots I took don’t really capture the majesty.)
Turning another ninety degrees, you see a wall utterly dominated by that image.
It’s a Charles Vess illustration entitled “Deirdre Of The Sorrows”. (You know that story, right? Yeats wrote a play about it.)
It’s pretty massive, more than four feet high by more than three wide, including the matte and frame. Chimera still has the entry for it in their catalogue, which includes a much more detailed picture of the image than you’ll get in my snapshot. Hopefully you can tell from the snapshot though that the matte and frame have added something to the presentation of the image.
The image is signed, which gives me an excuse to name-drop when people ask about it and mention that I’ve actually drank whiskey (out of a green man mug) with Vess.
At some future time, Deirdre is going to move to the top of the staircase that leads to the rec room–as soon as I can afford to install some additional lighting to properly present it there. The wall it is currently on in the purple room is actually ultimately where I will be presenting my reproduction of Longstaff’s Ghosts of Vimy Ridge. The Canadian War Museum has the original–and it’s the finest piece of art in their collection, despite the fact that it was painted by an Australian–and they will make a life-size reproduction on canvas for me whenever I can afford the crazy amount of money it costs. (If you want to see the image, Bartlett’s Battlefied Journeys sells a scaled down print that you can view online.) The reproduction I eventually get will probably be close to the original’s size–106″ x 53″ I think, although I might have to settle for a scaled down 80″ x 40″–and will be even more dominant than Deirdre is now. (I should note that for the purposes of parsing “eventually” that I’ve been talking about this for four years now, and I’m not really any closer to getting the reproduction.)
