A gallery of our art, part 4: the dining room

The penultimate stage in my gallery for Kerenza's series. This time I'll show you the art in the dining room which also doubles as a music room. In fact, at the moment, probably more music than dining. Anyway... to the art...

Mappa Mundi

Gold paint on paper, Ewan David Eason, 2018

Dan gave me this for my 40th birthday. Ewan David Eason created a series of map prints like this one although the originals were made from gold leaf! The maps are a response to Charles Booth's Descriptive Maps of Local Poverty from the late 1800s in which areas were colour coded according to lower, middle and upper class. Easons decision to paint every area in gold presents an egalitarian society. Of course, Luton wasn't included in his original list of locations so Dan commissioned this one specifically. I love it. See other cities (and actual gold leaf art) on Ewan's website.

Helvetica, Bodoni and Cooper Black

Silver print on coloured card, Andy Brown, 2002

Framed by Mike Spring

These works of design genius are from our friend Andy Brown. Each of these is a set of 8 A5 cards which come together to form the full image. The image itself is the numbers 0-9 all overlaid in outline in three different fonts - Cooper Black on the left, Helvetica in the middle and Bodoni on the right. I could stand in front of them for hours tracing the outline of each number in my mind. Helvetica is certainly easier than Cooper! You can't really see the detail in this photo so it's definitely worth checking them out on his website. Andy gave us the Helvetica print for our tenth anniversary and we bought the other two to complete the set. It's taken us about seven years to get around to framing them though - so glad we did.

The Happenin'

Print on paper, Chris Henley, 2019

When the Bear Club turned five years old, we held a one-day jazz festival to celebrate. A gathering of some of the world's best jazz musicians and composers, all bringing new pieces to play together and workshop throughout the day. It was a fantastic celebration of jazz, of music, of creativity and of the Bear Club. This commemorative poster was designed by Chris Henley - a brilliantly creative designer who I really enjoy working with. (If there's a product, or a website for a project I've been involved with, you can be fairly confident he designed it!)

Maps from a house survey

Bog standard print, 2019

Framed by Mike Spring

I'm pretty sure this is another one that some people would struggle to call art. They're probably right. These nine maps were all in the survey we had done when we bought this house. Each one has our home right at the centre and shows different elements of our surrounding area - parks, education, contamination, planning permissions and plenty more. We took them to our framer, Mike, who had the brilliant idea of creating circular apertures in the mount rather than squares and we love it (so we don't care if it isn't art!)

Grove's and a Pocket Trumpet

Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1938 edition

Pocket trumpet from local junk shop, £20

Not art, you say? I'm not listening any more. I inherited the Grove's from my Grandad and they now live on a floating shelf above the piano while this pocket trumpet hangs just above. You can probably make out the shadow of a trombone on the wall too?

Carpet

Sample from our old house, 2019

Framed by Mike Spring

If you're a long-term reader of my blog, you might remember that when we bought our first house at the other end of the road, it had this hideous stripy carpet in every room. Every. Single. Room. It was overwhelming - see my earlier post if you don't believe me. Over time we grew to "love" it so when we moved out last October we kept a sample and have just recently had it framed as a memento of the first home we ever owned. 

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Posted as part of Kerenza's Bloggers' Art Gallery. Please do visit hers, and other galleries too.