Art Exhibition – July 2020

I have quite a special and different kind of post for you all today. My blog friend, Kezzie, over on KezzieAG, had a wonderful idea for a few of our fellow bloggers to have a sort virtual art exhibit on our respective blogs, showcasing various art pieces that we have displayed in our homes. That is a fantastic idea, don’t you think? Especially in our current world conundrum where we all can’t simply go and visit our local museum.

I have quite a few pieces to show, but be aware that not all of them are considered typical “art”. But I’m quite proud of everything that I have displayed, especially the pieces that I have displayed in my bedroom, as I just recently hung art in there as I wanted my personal space to start feeling more like “home” and less like a big empty hotel room, which it was feeling like that for quite some time. We’ve been in our new house for over a year now and I’m just now getting my pictures hung! I certainly had the time to do it these last few months!

Prepare yourselves for a lot of photos in this post. But before I get started with my art expedition, we have to have the proper background music. And I have the perfect piece for your “walk” through my virtual home gallery. Even if you’re not a classical music listener like me, you’ve probably heard the beginning played in TV commercials and other short segments. It’s called, Pictures At An Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky, composed in 1874. One of my favorite classical pieces, but rarely heard, I thought that this would be the perfect music to listen to while reading through this post. I mean, the title literally says it all, doesn’t it? You can listen to it here, or you can YouTube it yourself and pick whatever version that you like. The one I chose is supposed to be the original piano version, but I’ve heard it played on other instruments as well and it sounds just as good.

Now, without further ado, please follow me into my home art gallery.

Living Room

Let’s start with one of my favorite pieces in our house. Now keep in mind that I don’t know the names of any of these pieces and didn’t want to go through the trouble of trying to take each of them down to try and search for what they might be called. If any of you happens to recognize any of these pieces and knows the names of them, feel free to enlighten me! Until then, I’ll just refer to them as numbers and what room that they are hanging in.

Anyway, this is piece #1, hanging in our living room. As you can see, there’s a lot going on here. People walking about in the city while it’s raining, as seen by the “wet-like” effect the artist used to show that people are walking in the rain (plus the fact that many of them are carrying umbrellas). Looking at this reminds me of the downtown area in my own city on a rainy day. If I were going out on a lunch break, I would see a similar scene like this.

The woman seen here is the obvious focal point of the whole painting as your eyes immediately go straight to her (at least mine do), with her white dress and white umbrella.

     

You can see other closeups that I took of the painting of various figures, which help add depth to the overall image. As you can see, up close, it just looks like dabs and smears of paint. But when you step back and look, your eyes naturally usher in these dabs and smears into one coherent whole. Clever!

Living room Piece(s) number 2 are probably some of my favorite ones in our house. You can probably guess why if you’ve been reading the blog for a while. My affinity for the color black is pretty evident. And see? We have matching furniture to add to the monochromatic look!

Living room Pieces(s) number 3 are more flowers, but with more color to them. And they are framed, which helps them stand out better.

Living room Piece number 4 isn’t really an art piece, but I like what it says. And with all of the wonderful friends that I have made over the years, I feel that this rings true. This hangs over our doorway, leading to the hallway, and straight ahead leads to the kitchen and dining room, which is where we’ll head next. If you will follow me…

Kitchen

 

Kitchen Pieces numbers 1 and 2 are the only “paintings” in our kitchen, which are hanging high above as you walk in. In fact, if you look closely enough, you can see them hanging in the previous photo if you look at the word “Flowers” and look slightly below that. That’s why these are not perfectly framed in the pictures. I had to raise my arms up in order to snap the pictures! I’m too short, lol…

          

Kitchen Pieces numbers 3 and 4 are “Kitchen Rules”, which translates into my rules. I most certainly enforce rule 2 in Kitchen Piece number 3, lol.

Dining Room

This Dining room painting number 1 is similar to the one that we have in our living room; depiction of people walking in a city-like scene during a rain shower. I love how the only colors that you see are the red trees and the slight blue of the figure’s umbrella. This makes for a nice autumn-like scene (the red trees give it that look) and rain is pretty common in these parts during the autumnal equinox. Nice brush strokes, nice use of two point perspective and depth of field; a painting that I’m truly proud to have in our home. The next one is even better!

                   

This is probably one of my absolute favorite paintings that we have. I mean, just look at it.  Amazing use of one point perspective, nice use of reflections on the ground to show that a rain shower has just passed over town, and great neutral color use, with the red jacket the woman is wearing as the only bright color. I love this painting, for all of the aforementioned reasons that I just listed. Between looking at the line of lamp posts, the style of the buildings and the “busy-like” background, I can’t help but think of a 19th century Sherlock Holmes scene.

Our final stop will be my room. I saved the best for last, so let’s head upstairs. Next stop, my room!

Mike’s Bedroom

The stairs leading up to my bedroom begin in the hallway between the living room off to the left and the kitchen on the right. The doorway at the bottom leads to my brother’s and mom’s bedrooms. We won’t be going there! At the top of the steps here is a landing and after a sharp turn is my bedroom (to the left of the banister). And on the wall above the steps, you see the first of many pictures that I have in my room. Here’s a close up of that picture, below.

Do I even need to say anything about these? I mean, they fit my motif perfectly, don’t you think? My mom bought these paintings for me when we first moved into our house. She knows me and she knows me well. 😉

You’ve probably noticed the postcards in some of pics surrounding my pictures. I’ll briefly talk about those.

With the exception of the Japanese characters that you see in the middle (I’ll get to that next), all of these postcards are from my pen pal who lives in Japan. I’ve known her since 2014 and we’ve been exchanging postcard art since we first met. She is a professional artist and I’m nowhere near as good as her when it comes to painting. But she is one of my biggest inspirations for my art to this day! These are some of my favorite paintings that she did for me.

        

Now this here is from a cultural convention that I attended way back during my graduating year in High School (2002) and there was a Japanese man there that was writing people’s names in Japanese, if I’m recalling that correctly. It’s been over 18 years after all. If any of you out there can read Japanese, can you tell me if this reads as “Michael” or some variation of it? I guess I could send a photo of this to my pen pal and she could tell me! 😉

On the left side of my window, are more postcards that I’ve received from friends over the years from various places; China, Russia, India, Thailand, to name a few.

 

Here are some postcards that one of my friends painted for me a few years ago. I think she is also a professional artist. I LOVE how she paints trees! I must learn her technique!

This was a framed painting that a friend gave to me as a gift a while back. It looks like it was done with watercolor and looks like one that I would have painted. Beautiful colors and nice use of distant spacing. I’d call it a winner!

This was a painting that I won in a drawing from our very own SIA friend, Erin (Loop Looks) back in 2017. I believe that it was an actual SIA project of ours, looking at some of my old e-mails from that time. Kelly Jo, a participant of GrowARTS, painted this awesome picture of a mug of coffee. And being a coffee drinker myself, of course I participated in the drawing and I actually won!  I think it may actually be the first time that I’ve ever won anything, so I’m super proud to be displaying this wonderful piece of art!

       

These three pieces are art projects that I did back in 2007, taking a painting class while in college. Keep in mind that these precede my postcards that you’ve seen on the blog (about 7 years before I started painting those) and are much bigger than the postcards. The latter two are acrylic paintings based off of two things. I painted these from the collage that I made, which is what you see in the first picture. Absolutely no painting for that one. It was all done by cutting out scraps from magazines. Where did I get the idea for this? It’s actually based off of a stage from one of my brother’s Sonic the Hedgehog games, the stage, “Oil Ocean Zone” has this enticing looking background resembling a cityscape, and while watching him play through this stage, I thought how I could turn it into a painting. Since then, I’ve based several postcard paintings off of this very concept. You just never know where inspiration will come from. 😉

These of course are not paintings, but I like them so I decided to include them here. They are to the left of the paintings that I just presented above (on the other side of the bolted door where our house insulation is kept). A lot of these “posters” I clipped out of magazines (back when I was really into anime). I’ve had most of these for close to 20 years, as they were hanging in my room at our old house (before we moved to our apartment back in 2013). I didn’t watch any of these (except Pokémon) but thought that they were cool nonetheless.

And more posters a bit further down the room. Keep in mind that my room is extremely long so I can actually space these things out! Quick side note. The Pokémon poster that you see here I got out of a magazine about 20 years ago! It’s nearly faded in color from all the years of having the Sun shining on it through a window in my old room, but it still looks pretty awesome!

This sticker was already on the wall when we first moved in. It was the only thing in what was soon to be my room, along with a few torn Barbie and butterfly stickers on the closet mirror. I could tell that this was a little girl’s room when I first looked at it. I decided not to take any of the stickers down, feeling that they give the room some personality. 🙂 I’m not averse to having a few “girly” things in my room, if they’re already there. Besides, I like this saying. Yet another message of encouragement to myself, left by the previous owners, to be proud of myself and to “Shine On”!

Of course I would have a Yu-Gi-Oh! picture up! Those of you who know me well enough know about my love and obsession with the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime. I watch it all the time, especially now that I have the entire DVD set of the first series (courtesy of my brother) and pretty much have all of the episodes (236 total) memorized, including the final movie, Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions, which was a totally awesome way to close out the first series. I’ve seen some of the succeeding series after the first one, but they all pale in comparison to numeral uno. And for those of you who don’t understand my love of the show, for all of you Star Wars, Marvel, and DC movie lovers, the Yu-Gi-Oh! series to me are these movie franchises are to you. Unfortunately, this is the only picture that I have at the moment, but am seriously thinking of finding some posters online to buy and add to my collection.

Just above the posters are my world maps (because I’m a total nerd). I used to stare at these maps back at my old house and is how I learned where places were in the world. Sometimes I wish that I was like my friend, Salazar and traveled. I wouldn’t mind visiting some of these places (when and if we ever come out of this pandemic). I’d also like to put some star charts up along here because again, I’m a total nerd. 😛

Someone from my job gave me this poster a while back. Not really my taste but pretty cool in terms of color and design.

These are more paintings that I did back in 2007, around the same time I did the “Oil Ocean” ones. And like those, these are also a lot bigger that the postcards that I paint now. They are located on the opposite side of the Oil Ocean ones and just to the right of my friend’s postcards from Japan. As you can see, my technique wasn’t nearly as refined as it is now, especially the volcano painting. Ugh…

Both of these are drawings/paintings that I did back in 2007 (boy was I busy that year!). Back when I was into anime, I tried creating my own characters and even attempted to create a written back story for them, but it never fully came into fruition.

If you recognize this guy, then you must be a Digimon lover of the late 90s. I was really into it at the time and this guy, Ken Ichijouji (aka, the “Digimon Emperor”) was one of the main villains of the second season of the Digimon anime, which I loved (before I discovered Yu-Gi-Oh! about a year later. Not a bad drawing if I do say so myself.

This is my final painting to show, as we exit my gallery; a painting by Claude Monet. Don’t you just love those colors?! I’m thinking that this could be a future SIA project. Maybe I should let the Terrific Trio of SIA hosts know!

And that’s it. I hope that you all enjoyed your virtual walkthrough my house and had a great time viewing all of the art/posters/postcards that we have in our home. Be sure to check out Kezzie’s blog (link at the beginning of this post) to see the great “art galleries” of other fellow blogger participants! And courtesy of Kezzie, here they are!

Alison

Ally

Anca

Bev

Hazel

Ivana

Julia

Kezzie

Mike

MK

Louise
Ros

Salazar

Sophie

Sheila

Vix

Take it easy everyone! And remember to wear those masks!!!