I get hundreds of press releases and product announcements every week, it comes with the territory. That's not a complaint. Not at all. I welcome those things and I find they are the easiest way for me to keep up with what's going on in my field.
I received one yesterday from Flambeau Lighting and the release featured this photo.
I love it. I love the pendants, I love the room. I love how the stripes from the shade continue up the rods to the ceiling. Here's a close up of the pendant itself.
I've always loved black and white color schemes because they remind me of Tim Burton's work. In 1985 I saw a short film by an unknown filmmaker. The film was called Frankenweenie and it was Tim Burton's first movie. It was a Disney production, as hard as that is to believe. You can find it on YouTube these days. Anyhow, I was struck by the visual style of that movie, I'd never seen anything like it. Burton ended up getting fired from Disney over the film and the world owes Disney a debt of gratitude for their wise decision. Though I'm sure it was traumatic for Burton at the time, that firing unleashed a breathtaking talent on the world.
photo courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art
Burton did a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art last year and it was cool to see how his style had evolved over the years and it was even more cool to see how much he'd held onto. Here's the ad MoMA put together while Burton's retrospective was running at the museum.
The pendant lights I started with have a Burton-esque feel to them and I like them all the more for it.
Believe it. That's the cameo vanity in pink. It's available too in black.
Here it is in cream.
That's real tufted leather upholstery on the drawer fronts and that cameo's a depiction of Elizabeth Windsor, the Queen of England, in an earlier, gentler time.
That's an Italian product aimed squarely at the US market. Again, I understand being provocative and I understand someone creating a buzzworthy object in order to sell the rest of his wares. But if this is the buzzworthy object and the rest of the wares are all but invisible, who at the helm of this ship?
I'm confused. Is Queen Elizabeth really a popular motif with American consumers? Is tufted leather remotely practical on the front of a vanity?
Would you put a pink, leather vanity with a Queen Elizabeth motif in your bathroom? If you were a manufacturer and this were in your product mix, would this be the thing you turned the stylists loose on to better disguise it in your catalog? I could think about all of this for days. I promise not to but I could.
If I were selling a product and I wanted to show it to the world I'd hire an ad agency to help me come up with a message and an overall feel for my product. Then I'd get a photographer and a stylist to work with my agency and me to help me sell more of my products by making my product look good. That's the way things work, right?
So if these are my product photos, what do you suppose I'm selling?
Am I selling moody young women in uncomfortable shoes? Am I selling army surplus blankets? Men's suits? Apathetic young men? The answer is none of the above. I'm selling this vanity and integrated mirror. I think.
How about this one. What am I selling in this photo?
No, I'm not selling dissatisfaction, I'm selling these pieces of furniture.
This photo from the same series, shows the product at least. Well, part of it anyway.
Honestly, I don't understand spending this kind of money on a photo shoot after spending years developing a product line. Why go to the trouble of a photo shoot when you you don't photograph the product you're selling?
Really, I understand art. I understand commerce too and the two can coexist. I don't know, maybe it's just me being cranky and pragmatic. But do product shots where the product is out of frame and out of focus do the basic job of a product photo? Namely, sell more products. Would you buy a vanity you couldn't see?
This post appeared originally on 1 June 2009. It remains one of my all-time biggest traffic draw to date. Who knew there was so much interest in Haint Blue.
I spend a fair amount of time specifying paint colors for people and last week I was working on a color scheme for the exterior of an older home. The clients warned me that they didn't want anything wild. I took that as a good sign because clearly, they'd seen some of my more adventurous work and they still called me.
So I came up with a scheme that involved three shades of taupe, white trim and a black front door. Ho-hum, but it was pretty refined and as instructed, "not wild." However, this house has wrap-around porches on the first and second floors, after all it's an old, traditional Florida house. I specified Sherwin Williams 7608, Adrift, for the porch ceilings. Adrift is a light, neutral blue. In an effort to sell the idea I referred to the ceiling color as Haint Blue and they were smitten and signed off immediately.
Painting a porch ceiling blue is a very traditional effect, even though it doesn't show up very often anymore. It's a southern thing, but I'm a Yankee's Yankee and I grew up in a house with a blue porch ceiling in Pennsylvania. Ours were blue because that was the color they were painted when my parents bought that house in the '60s and we never changed it. I think that there was some vague story about the color keeping spiders away. Like I said, they were vague stories and really, we never really talked about it very much. But every time we painted the house, those porch ceilings stayed blue.
Well, about a year-and-a-half ago, a great friend of mine moved to New Orleans. Within days of his landing there, he turned into a combination of Marie Laveau and Tennessee Williams. In a matter of hours, he'd absorbed all of the lore of that fable-filled city and was spouting it back like a lifetime resident. I have never seen someone make a geographic transition with that kind of ease and thoroughness. I envy him his sense of place sometimes. Anyhow, when he was telling me about his house on about day two, he mentioned that its front porch had a Haint Blue ceiling.
I'd never heard the term before, but I knew exactly what he meant. Apparently Haint Blue still figures prominently into New Orleans homes. I asked him where it got its name and he said that New Orleanians use that paint color to keep away haints, or or spirits of the dead with bad intentions.
Well, I did a little digging around, and the practice of painting a porch ceiling blue did start in the American south. The expression Haint Blue comes from the Gullah people of the South Carolina and Georgia low country. They painted the entries to their homes light blue to keep the bad spirits away. The blue color represented water, and as everybody knows, haints can't cross water.
If you were an impoverished descendant of slaves in the coastal south in the 1800s, you got paint the same way you built your house --from scratch. Powdered pigments were mixed with lime, white lead and milk. The lime and lead content of those early paints probably had the added benefit of poisoning insects that landed on it. So even though the pigment got all the credit, the credit was actually due to the toxic soup the pigments were suspended in. Any color of those old, home-brewed paints would have poisoned insects, but the Haint Blue got all the glory. This is interesting, because a blue ceiling is credited with repelling insects even now. Paint doesn't have lime or lead in it anymore, so it's not surprising that modern Haint Blue (and all house paint) is completely ineffective as a bug repellent.
All of the woo-woo nonsense not withstanding, painting a porch ceiling blue is an interesting, and depending on where you live, unexpected touch. So even if I don't buy the myth, I appreciate the connection to the past. If you're in the mood for an exterior color change , think about adding some Haint Blue.
I'm particularly thrilled that Respighi's Pines of Rome is on deck for tonight, it's one of my favorite pieces of music and I have an attachment to it that defies my ability to describe adequately. As always, there's a story behind it but first a little background.
The Pines of Rome is the middle chapter in Respighi's three-part Roman Trilogy. He wrote his trilogy between 1915 and 1928 and each debuted as a separate work. The Roman Trilogy is Respighi's loving tribute to the sights, sounds and history of Rome. It's a work of mind numbing emotion and huge swaths of it leave me a babbling, weeping fool no matter how ofter I listen to this music. The first chapter in the trilogy is Fontane di Roma, the Fountains of Rome. The Second is I Pini di Roma and the the third is Feste Romana, Roman Festivals. Since the Orchestra's only playing the Pines of Rome tonight, I'll restrict my gushing to it.
Each chapter is broken into for sections and each describes a different scene. The Pines of Rome consists of I Pini della Villa Borghese (The Pines of the Villa Borghese), I Pini Presso una Catacomba (Pines Near a Catacomb), I Pini del Gianicolo (The Pines of the Janiculum Hill) and I Pini della Via Appia (The Pines of the Appian Way).
This is the opening section, The Pines of the Villa Borghese. It tells the story of children playing army under the pine trees in the Villa Borghese near the Pincian Gate. Feel free to play this and keep reading.
Here's how my connection to this composition came to be.
In May of 2008 I was staying in a Roman neighborhood next to the Piazza Barberini. That's the lower arrow on this map.
The Piazza Barberini sits at the bottom of the Via Veneto and the Via Veneto starts at the Pincian gate. The Pincian gate is the upper arrow.
Here's Google's Street View of the gate.
I like to get up early and walk around when I'm visiting somewhere. One of the best ways to learn about a city is to watch it come to life in the morning. Rome has the added attraction of everyday life unfolding against a backdrop of truly ancient architecture. The Pincian Gate dates from the 5th Century and it was through this gate that Alaric and the Visigoths swarmed when they sacked Rome in 410. You know the expression "Barbarians at the gate?" Well, here's the place it referred to originally.
The Pincian Gate stands at the top of the Via Veneto and is one of the entrances to the Villa Borghese. The Villa Borghese is essentially Rome's Central Park and it's also the site where the Visigoths camped during their year-long siege of Rome.
So, it's now May of 2008 and it's a gorgeous spring morning and I'm taking a walk by myself. I'd loaded up an iPod with Italian music before I left the US and on that morning, Ottorino Respighi was my play list. I started listening to his Roman Trilogy and I was finishing up The Fountains of Rome when I approached the Pincian gate. What happened next was completely unplanned but as I stepped through the gate, I Pini della Villa Borghese started. Right in front of me I saw this.
That's my photo of the actual Pines of the Villa Borghese.
It hit me like a Mack truck that I was standing in the spot that inspired Respighi to write The Pines of the Villa Borghese. Since he'd written it around 84 years prior to my standing there, the odds were that I was looking at the very same trees he saw. I am not someone who's prone to losing control of his emotions. However, that realization, combined with the music I was was listening to was too much. I thought my head was going to explode as I burst into ecstatic tears and collapsed onto a low wall. I sat there for a while and listened through the rest of the Pines of Rome without taking another step. It was the wildest thing. It was as if I'd been given a private performance by the composer himself.
Hearing the result of a great artist's inspiration, whether it's a symphony or a banjo solo really gets my heart pumping. Better than other medium, a music invites you into an artist's world and then he invites you to stay. I get it that musical tastes are extremely subjective but no other musical form touches me quite the same way that a great, orchestral composition does. That a composer has an idea about how something might sound and then he goes out and creates the individual music for more than 100 instruments is an achievement of such stunning complexity it's hard to fathom.
Here's Respighi's entire Pines of Rome.
I Pini della Villa Borghese
I Pini Presso una Catacomba
I Pini del Gianicolo
I Pini della Via Appia
Now more than ever, community arts organizations, like my beloved Florida Orchestra, need your support. If you like the arts, whatever their form, patronize them. Go to the symphony, the ballet, the opera, a play. These organizations dedicate themselves the best humanity has to offer and they need your patronage to keep the lights on.
