Real People Collect Art

Art collecting sounds like a rich person's hobby - something waaaay out of budget for ordinary people.

Not so.

If spiffy art galleries are too expensive, there are unpretentious galleries too.  And venues like antique or craft stores and art and craft fairs that often display lower priced artworks.  Look in thrift stores!

My best thrift store find ever?  At one nasty-dirty thrift shop where I was looking for picture frames for set dressing - flip, flip, flip, through the art, then - wait... What was that, back a of couple frames?  An etching by Salvidor Dali that I bought for less than $5.  There are bargain treasures!

Dali by way of a thrift shop - gotta love it!

For less expensive art, look at art that come in multiples, like posters or prints.  Work on paper tends to be less costly than work in  paint on canvas or, for real sticker-shock, bronze sculpture.  Look for work by less well known artists or in less popular genres.

Let me make a plea for "real" art.

If you buy art made by living artists (from a gallery or direct from the artist's studio), you help support the Art Of Your Time, help support the lives of the very people who, a hundred or even a thousand years from now, will define our era.  "Real" art is work that real people put thought, care, skill, and intention into.  Sure it will pretty up your rooms, but living with art also enriches your life.  Serious art never goes stale - it continues to delight and enlighten.

Live with something you love.

Who says the fine art is not for us regular folks anyway?

I love the story of art collectors Herb and Dorothy Vogel - a librarian and a mailman - who put together one of the greatest collections of contemporary art.  Listen to Our Roving Art Critic talk about the Vogels at KMUW Wichita HERE.  (There's a great clip of a documentary film about them too.)

More on tips for buying inexpensive art on my Squidoo page Thrifty Shopping for Home Decor.

Set Designer's Day - The Hunt

A big part of some shows is The Hunt - the search for the right furniture or architectural details.  If the play is set in a historic period, ordinary contemporary doors or furniture just won't work - not as-is - so you have to find real or seeming antique styles for... everything.  This hunt is complicated by the limits of a theatrical budget.

For In the Other Room, we need to suggest the late 1800s.  So the whole design team is huntin'; yesterday the builders and I went to the local Habitat for Humanity resale shop, the Restore - a fantastic resource! - where new and used building supplies are sold for less than retail prices.

Middling success.  We found great new, but old-fashioned, doors - but they still cost too much, so we decided on plain flat-slab doors for only $5 each, to which we'll add molding to suggest two-panel doors.  We found inexpensive brass and china handles to use in building the machine.  But no luck on a period light fixture.  (I'll go back to see if anything new comes in next week.)

Afterwards I hit thrift shops and found 2/3 of the weather vane I'm going to cobble together; I still need a metal bird.  More thrift stores today!  When possible, it's good to shop first at thrift stores that support non-profit charities: for one thing, they have the odd, used, random things a theater set needs, for another, your theater's money is used to support another non-profit and a worthy cause.

Oh!  And shop with a car or truck that can carry your finds.  We almost had to strap those doors on a car roof, but managed to cram them (mostly) into another vehicle, tied in place with computer cable!