Reno's With Rosie - Creating the Curator Wall (With 2024 Updates)

If it isn't decorating magazines or pinterest, it's television or just talking to someone about what they're doing that inspires my wife Rose. She's always thinking. First comes the inspiration, then the planning, then dropping little hints around the house, "running it by me" just a little bit at a time so I won't get alarmed and the "fight or flee" instinct won't become active. 
Apparently it's a delicate balance.

As for me, usually I have no idea what's going on, I'm just minding my own business and then...wham o! And I have apparently agreed to some kind of expensive renovation, decorating project, major purchase, or vacation, somehow without even being aware of the fact that a decision was in the process of being made!

Oh well, mostly it works itself out and every once in a while I do exercise my veto vote, but not without careful deliberation, at least 5 seconds anyway. Rose gets her own veto vote as well so don't worry, we are an equal partnership (mostly, with a lot of zig-zagging back and forth).

But this particular project was really an excellent idea and it took no convincing at all. I took one look at the picture of the "curator wall" in Rose's magazine and I was on board.

The finished art wall.

After our trip to Italy in 2013, I have been itching to get some of my photographs printed, mounted and displayed around the house. I had already printed a bunch of calendars that turned out pretty well and I had enjoyed some success entering some images in the St. Albert Photo Club monthly competitions in November. One image of the snail or Momo staircase from the Vatican Museum won first place in digital images and another of a woman walking through the early morning mist in Piazza San Marco won second in printed images. Pretty heady stuff, let me tell you!

So when Rose mentioned her idea for showcasing my work, I jumped at the chance. Our first task was to find a suitable piece of galvanized pipe and the mounting flanges to get it up on the wall and properly supported. I looked around and finally found a nice, 6' piece of 1/2" galvanized pipe as well as the elbows and mounting flanges.

Galvanized pipe mounted on the wall from which the artwork hangs.

Meanwhile, Rose had been working on selecting and cleaning up some frames we had recently taken down when we repainted the house. She marked out an area on the floor approximating the size of the wall area we had to work with and we laid out the frames into the most pleasing arrangement we could come up with. 

We didn't want to spend a lot of money on new frames or new mats so she re-painted some of the old mats and painted select parts of the old frames, getting rid of any gold accents and replacing it with silver or black.

Frames with old artwork laid out on the floor.

Next was the hard part for me, choosing what to print, finding good images that told a bit of a story about our trip to Italy. We had this great long narrow frame that had a space for a 12"x36" image and I decided to crop a vertical shot of a man walking up a steep lane in the rain with a bright blue umbrella. It was shot in one of our favorite places in Italy, the town of Belagio on Lake Como in Northern Italy. We both loved the pop of blue and the wet cobblestone steps leading up to the bright opening at the top of the image where there was perhaps a little sun filtering through and illuminating the yellow walls.

Hanging the Images.

Most of the other images weren't hard to decide on. We both love the image of the grand canal in Venice from the foot of the Pont del Accademia with the blue gondolas in the foreground and the sun rising over Piazza San Marco and the Santa Maria della Salute Church.

We printed it in 24"x18"  at London Drugs (along with all of our other printing) and they did a great job. We went with 2 11"x 14" images along the top, the one on the left was taken in Rome, we had just arrived after a bit of a kerfuffle at the train station and then a mix-up picking up our keys and a rude person at the gelateria. While Rose kindly waited in line for some delicious gelato, I listened to the cello playing, tuxedo wearing busker in the most picturesque little alley staircase, it was quite magical and I took a couple of quick pictures (after depositing a few euros in appreciation).

Also in the top center is another shot of Venice taken on a misty morning on one of the smaller canals that criss-cross the city. Our first morning in Venice we woke up to some gorgeous fog blanketing the city and I loved it! On the top right side is a smaller shot of the ceiling in the Pantheon with a nice little beam of light shining through the 27 foot wide oculus. What an amazing building, we visited several times at different times of the day and it was always beautiful. 

Below that is another image from Rome, this one was taken in the Capitoline Museums but I don't remember who it is. The one below it on the right is a fairly modern statue built into the hillside in the town of Monterosso al Mare, Cinque Terre, Italy. This statue called Il Gigante, was built from concrete in 1910 but rough seas and allied bombs during WW2 have left this image of Neptune holding the waves at bay looking pretty forlorn and shabby. We both loved finding the statue there at the end of the beach and we visited it several times (gelato in hand) during our 4 days in Monterosso.

The living room with the couch half finished, but the art wall complete! - 2013

A few years have passed since we put up our Italy photographs and since then we have changed them out twice. The first time we changed it in 2018 to photographs from our Eastern Canada trip that we did with our trailer.

Eastern Canada scenes except for one of the Grand Canal and one of California - 2018

Then in 2024 Rose tired of those images and in an effort to bring the forest into our living room we replaced them again with a mix of B.C. and Alberta forest scenes.

Western Canada forest scenes 2024

In the photo of the 2013 Italy photographs up above a ways, you may notice the partly reupholstered couch. Here it is in late 2024 now and Rose has just ordered fabric to once again re-cover (for the 3rd time) a very comfortable, durable and well loved sofa.

Time just keeps marching on and while some things do change, some things (like that sofa frame) still stay the same.

Picture Perfect

My brother, sisters & I

I was thinking today about what makes a photograph art? And is there such a thing as the perfect photograph? Of course there's the subjective side of things and we may all have a different opinion on any given image. But for me, the answer might be connected to our concept of what life is. Is life just a random confluence of matter and time and events that just sort of falls out of the sky, or the brain, to splatter on the pavement in front of us to be interpreted sort of like a street Rorschach test? Or is there a lot more meaning to life, and a lot less random particle collisions with weird outcomes and more ………………….life, love, beauty, and God?

A photograph can be a lot of things, just like a human life. It can be dull, boring and flat, but useful. It can be a record of a place or time, but with no-one to care about it or be interested in it, it might seem to have no point. But if it has a connection to something or somewhere that people care about and are interested in, it has a life and a magic of its own. If it has a provenance that is somehow intertwined with our lives or something we care about it comes alive to us.

 Today I was looking at a box of old pictures that really tells a story of who my family is. After my mom’s death, it seems I was appointed as the “keeper of the past” without even realizing it, (and I didn’t even get a tee-shirt). There are hundreds of photographs and negatives and papers and keepsakes that are a living record of my family throughout the generations. As I looked at these old pictures of people, many of whom I didn’t even recognize, I was sad. Who were these people who were so obviously important to people who were important to people who were important to people I care about?

Normally, I don’t spend a lot of time taking family pictures or people pictures at all, but looking back through these old photos, I realize that they do have importance, even for those of us who are not sentimental about them. Most people are kind of funny looking and they definitely are not models so they don’t know how to pose very well and they make funny faces and have bad hair and weird clothes, wait a minute, that’s just me I’m talking about, you on the other hand, look great!

Don’t get me wrong, there is beauty in just being family to one another. All of those traditions and little rituals and trade-offs that are part of growing up Canadian in the times that we live in, have a meaning and a beauty of their own, I know that. And I know that an incredibly beautiful photograph can be absolutely empty of any other meaning if it doesn’t connect the viewer with life in some way. The best pictures connect us to something in our own lives, a memory, a moment, a fear, a shared experience, a dream, an emotion, even a nightmare. That’s the challenge of artists of all kinds, but especially the photographer. That’s what separates the record keepers, from those that can draw the viewer into the scene and capture their heart.

There are at the very least, two kinds of beauty when it comes to photographs: The kind that comes from the existing emotional attachment that we have with the subject and the kind that the photographer manages to evoke through the subject, or in spite of the subject, even without a pre-existing connection.

Life also seems to diverge into two parallel paths, do we choose door A with the easy path, the wide path that so many are taking, do we just follow along because it happens to be the easy way and everyone is doing it, or do we choose the narrow door, the one that looks hard to enter? If my record in the supermarket checkout line is any indication, I’m in trouble! But I've learned to stick with it and ride it out, even if my mind says, “go that way, fool.” 

Sorry, I don’t have a lot of answers, but when it comes to beauty, I’m convinced I have it right. To me, much of the beauty around us comes from the family who loves you and makes you happy. Beauty and perfection, in a photograph are very similar, if you love it, and it makes you happy, that's great, and if it happens to serve God in some way, even just by sharing the wonder of creation, or by recording the family that He gave you and the moments that you've shared with them, you just might be on the right track.

Mom, Terry, Chris, Doug, & Duke in 1962.