Good Read

The Great American House

by Gil Schaffer III

I have a weakness for wonderful design books and this, my latest fix, is truly a great one. Not only eye candy galore, but thoughtful text.    

Gil Schaffer is a renown architect who works with the traditional elements of classical American architect and reworks them to suite the way we live today.  

The book explores the elements of a great house; architecture, decoration, and landscape, and how Schaffer integrates the three to create truly exceptional places.  A great addition to anyone's library.

Audubon Prints in Your Home

Audubon Canvas Backed Duck

All design projects have a creative starting point, that something that starts the ball rolling.  For a recent library I designed, it was Audubon's Canvas Back Ducks.   The homeowner, with an international lifestyle, wanted something indigenous to the area, something that would relate the interior to it's location.

fabric selections

 After the print was chosen,  I selected fabrics using the soft shades of blues, greens and tans from the ducks' surroundings.  Our goal was to capture some of the serenity of the marsh.

Library and breakfast room

I pulled the deep red from the ducks head for accent pieces like the ox blood lamp and the ginger jar.

Library

Seagrass carpeting, rush seat benches and natural fiber window shades add an organic touch.

Audubon Prints

Beautiful, Timeless and Fascinating

Roseatte Spoonbill

Soetheby's NY 2012

Every year I have the privilege of previewing the Important Americana Auctions at Christies and Soetheby's in New York with the guides from Winterthur Museum.  

This year I was captivated by this amazing pair of Audubon' prints at Soetheby's.  Dramatic, vibrant and overwhelmingly beautiful.  (Mr. Keno was captivating as well!)

The two exceeded their auction estimates and sold for  $122,500 (the American Flamingo) and  $43,750 (Hooping Crane)

Christie's NY 2012

Across town  Christies' featured  the complete John James Audubon's  Birds of America The Duke of Portland Set. The complete, beautifully bound folios created quite the stir.

Incredible to see first hand, but a bit out of my price range, the  set sold for a whopping $7,922,500.

Anxious to refresh my knowledge of the artist, I pulled out my copy of Ella M Foshay's John James Audubon and my copy of Birds of America. ( Alas, mine is not worth $7,000,000.)

 In an nutshell, John James Audubon (1785-1851) came to America from France as a young man. An ornithologist, naturalist and painter, he set out to illustrate the birds of the new world.  Most of his works were drawn from life during his travels through North America.  Noted for their scientific accuracy and their depictions of the birds in their natural surroundings, these images are both beautiful and powerful.

The man himself, is a fascinating story of frontier naturalist and audacious self promoter. 

J.J. Audubon by John Syme 1826

Back in the real world, I stumbled upon a source for very affordable modern Audubon prints for the rest of us.

Although I can be a purist and poo poo reproductions, my very clever son pointed out that, with the exception of the original water colors, all Audubon prints are reproductions and the artist himself created them with mass production in mind.  

Quandary  solved.  As you can see from the photos in my shop, these prints are stunning, command attention and transcend the mere scientific representation of wildlife.  

Louisiana Heron

Snowy Egret

American Flamingo