I have long suspected that the word is divided into portrait and landscape people and never the twain do meet for each and every one of us becomes almost fixated on he kind of art we are drawn to and find it difficult to imagine offering wall space to anything but. Me, I am a people person. More specifically I a woman’s woman. I am drawn to junky oil paintings of women and girls, for reasons I barely understand. Certainly it has little to do with beauty – indeed some of the vaguely homo-erotic stuff from the 1930’s could be considered far more appealing, so no, it isn’t about beauty, but instead about the stories I imagine these un-named female subjects could tell. The secrets I am sure they are keeping. A sense of female knowing perhaps, that I could never glean from a similar portrait of a man. And so today, while my own man sweats profusely in the warm back yard, laying decking and chatting with the neighbours, I am here, crawling around the corridors of Ebay in search of woman I recognize, gathering kindred spirits for my own amusement and wishing there was enough wall space in this tiny terraced cottage to ask them to come find a permanent home here. So how about you? What do you like to have on your walls? Do you too find comfort in yesterdays faces or would you find it almost ghoulish to hang portraits of those you don’t know on your walls?
Create your own Brocante Life Book, plan Christmas, set up routines and rituals or live life the BrocanteHome way with my guided workbooks and planners.
“ You know you’ve grown up when you remember what you’ve given for Christmas, rather than what you’ve gotten. Perhaps one of the burdens of adulthood is losing the sense that all dreams can be contained in a tantalising square box, gaudy…
Heavens. Now here is a sentence I could once never have imagined typing: I am about to subscribe to The Lady magazine. Yes really. The Lady, once the doyenne of matronly ladies in twinset and tweed, is now quite the most perfect…
You have dreamt so often of what you would doIf your life were irrevocably changedThat when you are forced finally from the route best understood And on to another less obvious way,You think at first, fantasy will sustain youSink, then dream into…
It is a beautiful day. All early spring sun light and washing lines. You know when I started BrocanteHome nearly eighteen months ago I saw it as an opportunity to document my way of life: to show other women that quieting the…
While as far as I know, she isn’t one of my long lost relations, Becky May has got a cute collection of “Pretty Not Plastic” shoppers hasn’t she? Though it seems to me that our media driven nation has been all too…
1. Fill a tub with sudsy water and let the kids wash dollies clothes the old fashioned way in the back garden. 2. Sleep with the curtains open so you wake with the sun rise. 3. Take the kids scrapbook shopping and…
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My entire staircase is adorned with vintage wedding photographs of total strangers! I started my collection many years ago because I thought it the saddest thing that someones special day ended up at a car boot sale or whatever,they have pride of place in my home and I love them all!
I just started my collection of vintage oil portraits – I have two women and one young boy. I also just started a collection of vintage shell boxes that I think were called valentine boxes from sailors.
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My entire staircase is adorned with vintage wedding photographs of total strangers! I started my collection many years ago because I thought it the saddest thing that someones special day ended up at a car boot sale or whatever,they have pride of place in my home and I love them all!
Oh that's gorgeous Gena… what a lovely way to honour lost love. I bet they all feel like family now don't they?
I just started my collection of vintage oil portraits – I have two women and one young boy. I also just started a collection of vintage shell boxes that I think were called valentine boxes from sailors.