Many thanks to Jessica Shyba over at Momma’s Gone City for these poignant and honest words.
It doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes I am left alone in our home. My husband just left to take the big kids to school and the little ones to the park. The door shut, and the sounds in this home went from a vibrant, climactic heartbeat to a still, dull flatline.
I absorb it like sunshine on my skin for a moment, and then I begin to clean and prepare to get the red-carpet scroll of things done while I am alone. It’s a race to the finish line when the front door opens and little feet and big personalities race in.
Our home is lived in. I often lament during times like these or before we invite company over that our home looks like Romper Room. The children’s areas are everywhere. There’s a play yard in our living room, soccer nets in our back yard, and children’s chairs at the dining table in place of adult ones. We don’t have much space, and that’s ok. It’s just right for our family right this minute.
Read the full piece on British American Household Staffing’s blog: http://bahs.com/news/detail/the-evidence-of-children
At times, abstract painting can seem like a received package, with little space left to think outside of the box. In Virva Hinnemo, to overplay the postal metaphor, we have an artist “pushing the envelope”—in her case, literally so. A form vocabulary and a gestural lexicon familiar from mid-century American masters Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and Philip Guston meet the swift completion of their appointed rounds on flattened cartons as their repurposed, eccentric support. This strategy could have smacked of Arte Povera, Supports/Surfaces or currently fashionable “provisional” abstraction, but somehow in the hands of this Springs, NY-based Finnish artist the work manages to come across as visually sophisticated but stylistically innocent. Their charming, unforced modernism fits right into the refreshingly old-fashioned surroundings of this plush new venue, sharing quarters with another of proprietor Anita Rogers’ enterprises and thus itself an eccentric support.
