hogglestock

The reason we hired someone to help us to decorate our house was that it had been six years since our renovation and we hadn’t really made much progress filling in gaps and doing things like replacing our dining room table. Although John had a very good eye, we suffered from more than a little decorating inertia. Whenever we went to antique shops, there was much to admire, but we really didn’t know where to start.

A good friend of mine is an antiques hound and lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania which is rich with, and adjacent to, lots of great antiques shops. This past summer I went to stay with him and his husband and we tooled around their neck of the woods and went up to the Catskills and Hudson River Valley as well. It took me a minute to figure out what direction I might want to go with my purchasing, but once I did, I really hit a groove and came back with a crap load of stuff.

An amazing vignette at Kabinett & Kammer in Franklin, New York. It is amazingly well curated and really reasonably priced. I ended up buying that wooden form behind St. Francis with his head blown off and my friend bought St. Francis.

The whole adventure was extremely bittersweet. One of the many facets of survivor guilt is its appearance when you start to have fun. Mine was exacerbated by the fact that John would have loved to have been on this kind of a trip. In fact, we had tried to do so the previous summer up in New England, but a combination of things including Hurricane Henri thwarted all our efforts. So as I ran around with my friend having a great time, it made me quite sad to think that once we made our decision to decorate in earnest, John never had the chance to get over his decorating inertia in real life. And here I was living it up doing all the stuff he never got to do. It sucks. And it makes me sad.

At first I stuck to buying art–it was what I felt most assured of. When it came to objects and furniture I was much more unsure of myself. But as the days went by, I got over that as well. It helps to have a friend who gives good advice, but it also just comes down to buying what you like. I was immediately drawn to the giant painting of the soldier but I was thinking I didn’t want something that militaristic. But then I realized it looked like England in WWII and I thought of all the great English fiction I love from that period and then I had to have it.

I should mention that I don’t “collect” antiques, or even art for that matter. I buy what I like. I don’t really care if it is a good example of something, or has a good provenance or any of those things collectors care about.

I wanted to find a painting that spoke to my officephilia, and this painting kind of did the trick. Especially with the little industrial desk I found to go in the corner of my bedroom.