I know that you will think I’ve come unhinged, but we really are expecting snow. Three to five inches and my sanity is, seriously, hanging by a thread. I told Bill last week, “When people ask how I am, I am going to say, ‘I am not fine.’ Because I’m not.” So I have retreated a bit to small, dark spaces and started thinking about the bathroom that we recently finished in the basement. I kept the original turquoise sink and toilet because, well, they’re turquoise and what could be more fabulous? Now I get to paint the walls.
This page from a recent Serena & Lily catalogue caught my eye. I thought this might be a clever way to use the four-hundred-and-fifty-two sample jars of paint that I have languishing in my basement.
Then, somewhere trolling the internet, I ran across an image of Cecil Beaton’s powder room and, truly, I cannot imagine anything more charming than guests tracing their hands on the wall.
I had asked the boys (it is the basement, so mostly their domaine and their crowd) what they thought about my painting frames around squares of chalkboard paint and then their friends could draw their own pictures on the walls. “They wouldn’t do anything crude would they? Naughty?” I asked. All three, in three different exchanges said, “Yeah, mom, of course they would.” And I thought with annoyance not for the first time, “Girls wouldn’t.”
So I’ve settled on something in-between. I think I am going to paint replicas of some of my favorite paintings, something of an Abstract Expressionists hall of fame, and leave a few blank with the tempting chalkboard centers. Naughtiness be damned.
Images, from top, Serena and Lily, unknown, Graham and Brown Wallpaper and Cafe Sebastienne at the Kemper Museum here in town which is a personal favorite.
