{silk on vintage painting}

i was really intrigued by a painting that i saw the other day, this one is by leslie oschmann in holland, a former anthropologie art director. she buys old portrait paintings are flea markets in europe and adds modern touches to them, like this piece of silk that she added around the neck of this lady. how pretty.

Leslie Oschmann, originally uploaded by decor8.

it really reminded me of what my friend linda at volksfaden in berlin has been doing on her fabric website for a long time now, she embellishes old black and white stock photography with snippets of modern fabrics, of course it's all done via Photoshop, but i think that the concept is the same more or less. back to this painting... now i'm thinking of buying a little landscape oil painting that i found at a junk shop here just a few days ago, around the corner from my home. the only reason i did not buy it is because there was a chip of paint missing in the sky revealing the canvas. how silly of me to bypass a lovely little painting for such a small imperfection. thinking about this now has me worried. the 'old' holly, the holly who was once pretty broke living alone putting herself through work and college, would have purchased the painting and done something interesting with it, loved the flaw, or perhaps painted over the flaw. now the holly who has two cozy apartments, a good income, and a husband no longer views a flaw as a chance to be creative and that is a much bigger flaw. i think that often we are much more creative when we have access to fewer products or cannot afford the new things. i feel as though in my current apartment i would have been much more creative about decorating had i not had the money to spend on things. i would have sewed my own curtains, made all of my pillows, taken the skills i learned from my mom and made everything myself. she made our roman shades, blankets, shower curtains, chair covers, pillows, everything... and she did it because she grew up on a farm where they made things and it was because money was tight. as an adult, my mother made things because while we had the money to buy new things, she felt it was more relaxing and personally rewarding to make it herself. perhaps that is really the problem here, i may need to change my thinking here. i may need to think more about the enjoyment aspect, the feeling of "i did it myself" and not so much that i have the money to spend on things already made. i think so many times in life we get stuck in the mud in our brains. i will go to the junk shop and pick up that small painting with the chipped sky. i will show you it on my blog. i will make it pretty again and give it love, i'll use my own hands to do it. stay tuned. because money, either having or not having, should never be the motivating reason behind crafting. it should be passion and love for the craft. writing this post helped me to tap back into what i've always known to be true but had lost touch of over the past few months, maybe even years. (image from leslie oschmann)