Anybody Know How To Get Disemboweled Economy Stains Out Of Your Smock?

More daubing at the walls here from a almost a decade ago. It’s a sort-of proof of concept for an entirely painted foyer, and a business plan. The background color was a vaguely ocher color, and the motif was to be based on a series of Chinese tapestries:

It took much longer to prepare and paint the walls than to do the mural. I was very loose with this one. I put the paint (acrylic) on the wall fast and very roughly. It’s no great shakes, but it looked painterly, anyway. The foyer was “close” and vertical, and putting a heavy band of color low would have spread it out visually pretty well. I’d done lots of faux bois and faux marble, and other textural stuff before. Some trompe l’oeil, but mostly architectural things, not things from nature.

I wasn’t in the furniture business yet when I did these. I wrote eight, two-page rough draft business plans when I stopped working in the commercial construction management field. Decorative painting was one of them, along with furniture. Several of them involved moving to Maine in search of ramshackle houses. I was surprised to read them after almost a decade. They’re prescient and insane in equal measure, like all good business plans are.

I did notice that none of the business plans had an entry for the entire world losing its collective mind and the economy disemboweling itself and throwing its entrails at me after a few years in business. A fever of 105 on and off for several months was also overlooked. Other than that, they all would have worked, I imagine.

Painting on the walls is not art, really. It’s like architecture, which isn’t really one thing. Architecture is a melding of structural, aesthetic, and psychological concerns.

The book I got this out of is entirely useful for finding themes for decorative art: Racinet’s Full-Color Picture Sourcebook of Historic Ornament: All 120 Plates from “L’Ornement Polychrome,” Series II