Gallery walls

There's something terribly bleak about pile upon pile of the ephemera of past lives – dead people's stuff – and so much of it, that with each step I feel increasingly forlorn, if not downright depressed. It's not that I'm creeped out by the modern equivalent of grave goods still awaiting decent burial or burning, it's more that the amount of crap (and there's no other word for it) that has been produced, is still being produced, and will continue to be produced. This is not to say that none of it is without value be it to poor families, young marrieds looking to impress the subdivision, pickers, the recyclers of 60s and 70s worst moments, the taste-bereft or the aesthetically unrestrained.

If I were still suffering from visual and moral dyspepsia after yesterday's tour of a flea antiques market I might take a jaundiced view and say that, occasionally, I feel restraint is long gone from interior design and with it also are gone the underpinnings of history, utility and balance. I might wish my view were not so jaundiced and there certainly are times when my negativity is denied but I am sure of one thing and it is that balance is not understood or, at least, not often apparent, or even appreciated in today's interior design as seen in magazines and books. It is very hard nowadays to get a balanced idea of how a room works – there's a wealth of visual information in the form of vignettes, partial views and close-ups but actually to see how a room functions in relation the people who use it is a rare treat.

So, you might ask, what has got me on this path. In a word, Pinterest. Don't get me wrong – I don't dislike Pinterest, but my ability as a twenty-first-century man living at this week's apex of technological advancement to use a lot of time looking at pretty pictures (dogs or rooms, it doesn't matter) is truly worrying. I cannot blame Pinterest for that. These photographs below and their ilk, from a Google search, have led me to rethink the placement of five drawings (they hang in a row) on our living room wall – remove them altogether or leave one.

It's not just the incoherence, absence of balance, or the seeming unconsidered nature of the relationship to the wall and the room itself that bothers me: it is that they are not contained (in my old-fashioned way, I prefer disparate images to be contained, grid-like, within an implied border and despite asymmetry have balance) and appear to disperse from more than one centre. Also, it looks as if someone spent a lot of time trawling flea-markets – in itself not a bad thing, unless you're me, that is.

I realize, also, these present day asymmetrical arrangements of images and objects, so-called gallery walls, are not just reactions to static, yawn-inducingly-traditional groupings, such as in the photograph below, but a definite but not extreme attempt in their beginnings to enliven a modern way of living in traditional interiors. Now these gallery walls are a fad and as to whether that is a bad thing the jury is still out.  What I do know is that asymmetry is hard to achieve without an eye educated about balance.

There are precedents of course, not few and far between: two literally gallery walls (Uffizi and Royal Academy) and they share a common purpose – display, both artistic and social - with the following two (Van Day Truex and William Pahlman).  I'm not sure if Pahlmann's is an in-store display or a residence but either way that display of artwork above the cabinet must have seemed wonderfully modern at the time. Pahlmann's work is a little hard to assess at this remove but that is a discussion for another day.

John Zoffany's Tribuna of the Uffizi, 1772

William Powell Frith's A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881

Van Day Truex, 1944

William Pahlmann, 1950s

Behind this discussion (rant?) about placement of pictures on walls are thoughts I've been having about walls just being allowed to be themselves and not just supports for art or artifacts. Not revolutionary, this idea of having walls bare except for an applied finish, but it occupies me and I would like to discuss it in the near future.

A Pinterest of a book

I don't consider myself to be a "fan." I don't seem to have the ability to be passionate, to the nth degree, about much, if anything. I appreciate beauty and talent where I find it, but I rarely find it consistently – it's unusual for me, that is, to be so taken with a designer, or an artist, that everything they do delights me.

Thus, when I say that I am not a fan of Miles Redd, I don't want you to misunderstand me – I'm not not, I should say. I'm not anti-Miles Redd for some of his work I like and some of it I don't care for. Some of it is fun, bold, sassy, a clever pastiche, and some of it is trite, cute, derivative, and occasionally ridiculous. More style than substance in fact.

I am a fan of books, of course, especially books about decorating, so I was delighted to be lent a copy of Miles Redd's The Big Book of Chic. Well, it's certainly big and really makes a statement on the coffee table. But I must confess, leafing through what I can only describe as this tome, I came away unsatisfied. Rarely, I felt, have so many trees been slaughtered for so little purpose.

It's as if Mr. Redd had printed out his Pinterest page. Printed it out on lovely rustly cartridge paper, bound it in wonderful thick wrapped board, and finished it off with a glossy dust jacket courtesy of Assouline. But a Pinterest it remains – droll quotations, notwithstanding.

One half expects to turn the page and find two cute Labrador puppies in a basket, or a four-poster bed in a meadow of flowers (picturelesspinterest.tumblr.com). Well, maybe Salukis would be more chic than Labradors, but you gets the idea.


I am a fan of books, as I say above, and the design of them (perhaps because my first degree was in graphic design) is of interest and concern. An agglomeration of photographs with a small amount of text is, in itself, no bad thing for not all interior design books need essays of pith and moment to accompany imagery – visuals that, sometimes, very clearly belie the text. Yet a book that is all imagery beyond a few words as an introductory chapter is somehow unsatisfactory – we are used to explanations and feel, and are, cheated if they are not there. Mr. Redd's book is more than that but when one is faced, for example, with images repeated as vignettes or with an identical image, but black and white, pairing the one on the opposite page the result cannot help but be unsubstantial and unsatisfying. I'd love see more of Mr. Redd's work and understand more about his design proces and philosophy, but sadly this book delivers neither.