Fine Art: 58 Cents Per Square Foot

We moved into this place over a year ago, and, until this weekend, the walls of the upstairs hallway had remained bare apart from six painted screw heads. I didn't want to move the screws in the wall since I didn't have the correct color touch-up paint.  Besides, they weren't hurting anything, so I left them.

The area was so large it was difficult to find or even envision a solution for it.  A giant piece of art would have been too expensive, and a bunch of random art wouldn't have looked right.  A huge number of photos would have been out of place as well.  Keeping it blank wasn't working since the hallway can be seen from the downstairs entryway.

The wife and I would occasionally hit furniture stores and places like that for something that would look... I dunno... good enough, I guess.  "Perfect" wasn't going to happen. Whether it looked "good" was immaterial.  "Good enough" was all we were shooting for and we didn't see anything we liked.

The walls would probably still be bare if it weren't for a bike helmet. 

It was time for my boy to get a bicycle helmet that didn't advertise a Pixar character so we went to a bike store to get one "like dad's".  After that, we went to an Uno's for lunch next to a craft store.  He knows that craft stores carry cool, cheap wooden things to build and paint, so, after our pizza, we went next door to "just look".

Inside, we passed a huge pile of 18" x 24" canvases and I did a double take at the price.   For about seven dollars, I could get four of them - a perfect number of canvases to de-blank the upstairs hallway.  Sweet... I wondered how cheaply I could do this.  Even if I totally failed, I would be out less than the price of a bottle of wine.

Since I (still) didn't want to remove the screws, I kept them there and placed the bare canvases on the wall like you see here:

I liked the arrangement, so I decided to stick with it.

The first order of business was to build an easel (of sorts) where the under-construction paintings could be worked on at once a) while not needing four separate easels and b) approximating their final layout as much as possible.

After I measured and cut some scrap wood to size the boy helped me build the easel you see here:

The canvases were mounted a little lower than their final configuration was intended to be and the easel was made sturdy enough to make life easier for both of us. I didn't have to kill my back stooping, he didn't need to stand on his toes to reach everything and neither of us had to worry about the contraption getting knocked over. 

But what to paint?  I am not an artist whatsoever and all I was willing to use was the leftover stuff I had in the garage from previous projects. We had bluish-grey (mailbox post), red (toolbox and birdhouse), white (lots of stuff), black (security lights), reddish brown (outdoor metalwork and table), and tan (some walls). Although I guess we could have used my kid's art supplies to enormously expand the palette of available colors I felt that would have been cheating, somehow...

Besides, limiting myself to rags and chip brushes and the various indoor and outdoor house paints taking up shelf space was a more fun challenge with the bonus that, if everything looked crummy in the end, I had the excuse "I was, like, totally limited by the media I had at hand". :)

Here are some pics of the work in progress:

Now that the paintings were done, it was time for frames.  The only wood I had in quantity on hand was my stash of barnwood. I rescued this stuff from a dilapidated corn crib on my father-in-law's land a few years ago.  The wood is between 80 and 100 years old and is kind of tricky to work with.  Rusty nail parts and shotgun lead pepper the boards and the decades turned the soft pine reddish and mineral-rich.  The grooves from the original saw-mill cuts and the insect holes provide a unique surface to every piece.  

The warped pieces needed to be cut into 3" wide sections, planed, then cut again to 2 1/2" to make them frame-worthy. 

I stained them with some leftover stuff from the Planter Box project and sealed them with leftover spar sealant from the D20 project. Here are the finished pieces.

Maybe not Louvre quality, but certainly T.J.Maxx bargain aisle quality, which is plenty good enough for me.  

I had fun doing this and I learned a lot, especially about how tricky it can be to precisely frame a canvas.  The boy was pleased and he asked if we could do a city next.  Great idea.  I think a metropolitan scene would look great in the guest bedroom...