Shelfies
I have little experience or skill with selfies, but I’m a big fan of shelfies.
Shelfies, you ask? Shelfies are tiny pieces of art—in my case tiny paintings—that can be displayed in an arrangement on a shelf, perched on a console table or dresser, propped atop the frame of a large mirror, or tucked into all manner of little nooks and crannies around a home.
Once I took up painting, I delighted in placing my small paintings in various locations throughout our home, and then went on to take even greater delight in the ease and visual novelty of switching the location of a given painting or having a collection of as many as a dozen paintings at the ready for swapping out in a single location.
For example, I’ve painted numerous tiny-art renderings for Dave—to celebrate his birthday (more than once), Valentine’s Day (more than once), our anniversary (more than once), or a change of season (more than once). I keep the collection in a drawer in our master bedroom and rotate through the individual shelfies regularly, setting the current selection in a small easel stand on Dave’s dresser where it catches our eye each time we enter the room.
Show and tell:
a place to feature a different shelfie each week for my tutorial students
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16 responses to “Shelfies”
Oh Dotty….I couldn’t love this more! First of all I love shelves in general because I have so much fun curating a collection of things that tell a story. And your idea of adding your small shelfies is brilliant adding so much to your shelf stories. And having your art sprinkled all over your home makes me smile from ear to ear. I think I will consider something like this myself.
I love them all…but am particularly drawn to that first one with the dots…and everything you paired it with!
Pure JOY!
MaryAnn, thank you for jumping with joy in your comments. You are a queen of curated collections on shelves, which includes exactly the kind of swapping in and out of various bits of art and whimsy I refer to.
The first shelfie featured above was my bday card to Dave a year ago, with the title “It Occurs to Him That He Thought He Would Always Be … Oh, Thirty Two.” It was a fun one to create and went through many layers before arriving at its current iteration.
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I think I found my way to small pieces about a year after I first took up painting when I bumped into Carol Marine’s Daily Painting book and committed myself to a painting a day for about a year; I did mostly 6×6″ and through that experience began to discover experientially how ‘big’ a small piece can be. Thanks for your affirming feedback, Carol!
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