The Magic House art collection

Blog, here are two of the great things about my life:

(1) I get to meet and know a lot of creative, artistic people, and
(2) My husband loves to shop.

The cumulative effect of these two factors is that my home, aka Magic House, has acquired quite a collection of art pieces I really love. Oh, I'll add modestly that I make a lot of stuff of my own, and sometimes it turns out good enough to display proudly as well.

Yesterday I completed a project I'd wanted to do for awhile: inventorying our art collection. We have over 100 pieces of wall art and displayable objects, so many that we sometimes have to rotate them in and out, like a real gallery. It was fun for me to really appreciate and savor each piece by recording it, the artist, the place we got it, and its current location. (And yes, I am a little bit anal-retentive, why do you ask?)

I photographed a sample of things...some that are my favorites, and some that just seem representative of the sorts of things we collect.  And here they are:

Frank Lloyd Wright Bradley Skylight glass panel, and ceramic bowl with "rock heads" by a local artist whose name, alas, I have lost.

One of our prize possessions, the "Time Travel Orb," which is a fused glass ball with a floating boulder opal by James Yaun. The faux metal cat scupture was made by me. Also love this side table, with a concrete top with embedded rocks, one of a kind, by a Wisconsin company.

Also prized: original Route 66 Polaroid photo by our daughter Katie's boyfriend Chris Robleski (yes, we are fortunately to have a slew of his stuff on display), and painting of Santa Monica Pier bought for us at Dan Rice's Rt. 66 to Cali stand.

A total surprise gift from husband Davie, these are actual "etched" leaves in a shadowbox. Artist: Bookey Morey.

Print of a watercolor/ink landscape of Galena, Illinois by one of our favorite artists, Carl Johnson. We have five of his prints hanging in our house--this one is in the powder room.

Pizza house by Heather Goldmine, and Rinconada cat from Uraguay, on the living room window seat.

Centipede etching, #3 of 3, by daughter Katie Nelson, in the bedroom.

Milwaukee River Renaissance by Lynn Casper, in the bedroom.

A few years ago, Katie and I made custom ceramic cats for each family member for Valentine's Day. Each of us also got a photo of all four cats. Quill (for a writer) is mine, and Scrubs is Davie's (for his cleaning business).

I made this dish garden, which is currently on the wine rack under the installation of 12 of Katie's "textures" photographs.

Love this tile frame with a photo I took of Lake Michigan. Small root wood bowl with rocks. And the inimitable "Magic Bowl" which a local artist painstakingly made and now serves as our cats' water dish because they refuse to drink out of anything else.

If you receive/obtain/create beautiful things, it's very important to appreciate them, Blog. I make a point of walking around our home periodically, just looking at what we have. Beauty is one of the things that simply makes life worth living, wouldn't you say?