May your weekend be filled with vintage bathing suits, dips in cool pools, bbq’s, good bloody mary’s, the sound of children laughing (in the distance), garden planting, and hopefully not smoking.

Enjoy!

Photo via Lana Del Rey’s Facebook. 

I officially vote 2012 the year of trends you are most likely to regret in ten years. Let’s review: Copious amounts of neon, check. Animal print skinny jeans, Check. Tie Dye Jeans, Check. High heeled sneakers, Check. I like a good trend as much as the next person, but A. These are last years trends, and B. It’s not a good sign when you want to sell your floral blazer midway through the season.

My reaction: BACK TO BASICS  and clothes with good shapes. (Some of the floral print trousers have such nice shapes that I actually think they will look classic and feminine at any point in the future.) I like to mix basics with crazy stuff I collect, and have been digging through my archives lately and resurrecting a lot of stuff from 2003-5, I was around 20-22 then, and it was after I lost the freshman 15 (30) and the first time I had my own money. (Apparently 2006-2010 were not good to me fashion wise, because I hate most of the clothes from those years, or maybe I was just pregnant?) I post a lot of outfits on instagram HERE, in case you were wondering.

Anyway, for all Carrie’s crazy fashion moments, this one resonates with me. That could have been 20 years ago, or it could have been yesterday. And she looks killer. That body doesn’t hurt, either.

Thoughts? 2012 fashion, yea or nay? What’s your classic style ideal?

Last week, a friend of mine told me he’d just attended a really cool art opening and showed me some photos on his iPhone.  A few days later, I just happened to be walking in the Meatpacking district, and I stumbled upon that same exhibit! It’s the art of Roy Nachum, and the show is entitled Open Your Eyes.

The show was divided into 4 sections and explored Nachum’s signature themes of perception and vision, blindness, illusion and reality. All of his work is painted onto canvas in which poetry written by the artist have been transcribed in braille. My favorite series represented was “Parallel Realities”. This series features a vividly drawn animal interacting with a human as well as color fields in washes… This girl with the gorilla and the balloon… wow. My other favorite is the giraffe painting, below. Look at the close up! I think that in the case of the gorilla and giraffe paintings, the braille adds SO MUCH to the work! It seems aesthetically purposeful.

Another series that I thought was interesting was Color Blind. The round paintings are based on the tests for colorblindness and apparently those who are colorblind can’t see the images of the women.

There were two other series Invisible Mirrors, not pictured, and Sea of Crowns… which is a sea of crowns below hanging red ribbon.

So what do you think? Any favorites? Does the show make you question the subjectivity and vulnerability of our vision and perception?

Have a great day everyone!

MAY 11 – JUNE 11, 2012

JOSEPH NAHMAD CONTEMPORARY
450 W 14TH STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10014

So this week is BLOGFEST, an event hosted by Kravet, that’s brought together some of my favorite bloggers from across the web-o-sphere.

Bear with me for a minute:

This is a typical conversation between my mother in law and my mother: “You are the best in law! I love you like a sister!” ” Noooooooooo, YOU are the best in law!” “You throw the best parties and raised the best child!” “NOOOOOO YOUUUUUUUUUUUU are the best mother and party thrower!” ” Thank you SOOOOO MUCHHHH for your help finding a new XYZ, you are THE BEST AT THAT!” “AWWWWW NO YOUUUUUU ARE!” Cut to me rolling my eyes in the back seat and starting to tease them….

This is what blog fest is like. “OMG- Sketch42?!?!?! I LOVE YOUUUUUURRRRRRRRRR blog and your house!” ” NOOOOO, Erica, I LOVE YOUUUURRRRRRRRR HOUSE!!!!”  ”No, no, no- youuuu are so awesome…..”  ”NO, YOU ARE!!!!!!!!”

LOL. It’s one big giant humble/brag (as Alex put it)!  And I mean that in the best WAY POSSIBLE. It’s so exciting for everyone to meet up with the blogging badasses that we’ve been following from obscurity to success! Every one of these girls have made a name for themselves by putting themselves and their homes out there, and most have been published, or will be soon. Not only do they blog daily, but they have the balls to show us where and how they live. These are the people changing the conversation we have online about interiors!

So these are the apartments I’ve been hanging out with this week. HA.

Sue, The Zhush

Jamie Meares, Furbish

Chassity, Look Linger Love 

Erica, Small Shop Studio

Alex, Things That Sparkle

Erica, Design Blahg

Naomi, Design Manifest

Susan, House of Brinson

So much fun to hang with the girls behind the homes- many of which I’ve posted before- and the people behind the blogs that kill it daily in the blog-o-sphere…. So in conclusion:

Noooooooo, I love youuuuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrrr blogggggggggggg.

This collaboration by  designers culdesac  and the paint company valentine is a celebration of the ever evolving tools artists use. A friend sent it to me (Thanks!) and I think its witty, intuitive and fun. The collab is about the form following function, the way you can visibly imagine a someone using the tool is the way the paint looks on the canvas. Whip it, clench it, twist it, roll it, drag it. Every artist has used something funky to make art, creating new tools is part of the fun.

I think I would buy the whip and the hand brush if I had to choose. You?

Via Design Boom

Its high Spring. Very high. Almost summer…The wardrobes in NYC have gone through a decided shift. People are already breaking out the shorts (something I don’t do often in NYC and if I do they are loose and at least mid-thigh), but skinny jeans feel like straight jacket. That peel your jeans off at night feeling is NOT fun. So I’ve turned to baggier stuff, some good basics and a few fun pieces thrown in. Im one of those people that can’t buy clothes in advance like we did in the 80′s… I buy it right when I need to wear it and if I don’t wear it immediately, I know I don’t like it that much. (And why do I need to buy so much stuff, last year I was 20 lbs overweight from the baby and the summer before I was pregnant.)

Last time I did a roundup I had to disclaim that I don’t actually own all this stuff. This time I want to give my personal recommendation of awesomeness on a few products. The first: Club Monaco V neck T-shirts with a pocket. They are awesome. I just bought these again(this is like my third batch) in every color. So slinky and I buy a medium so they can be a bit oversized.  The next personal recommendation is for the black All Saints Pilot pants. They look like nothing special on the computer but in person they fit so well. They don’t have a drop crotch but they do have elastic around the ankles with a zipper, and whatever material they are (I can’t figure it out, really) they just don’t look like pajamas. They look great with heels and flats. They are glorified sweatpants and they get the Sketch42 stamp of approval.

I just bought these tropical shorts and the Jamaica dress from Topshop, but I have yet to wear them so I can only tell you they are really cute, but not how well they will work. Everything else is speculation/lust. I just became aware of these Cynthia Rowley for Roxy wetsuits, and WOW are they cool. I think I need to take up surfing just so I can own one of these. Amazing.  The Lomo camera is something I want to play with, white distressed shorts are a new staple and the four finger knuckle dusters are amazing. We all need at least one crazy shoe in our wardrobes and the Charolotte Olympia walk the line between crazy and prim.

Club Monaco T shirts: $39

Lomo Camera: $109

Jamaica Dress: $72

Cynthia Rowley for Roxy Wetsuit: $195

Maison Martin Margiela Rose Gold Knuckleduster ring: $495

Distressed white shorts: $158

Sunglasses: $160

All Saints Pilot Pants: $195

TopShop Peplum Top: $48

Chloe Wedges: $945

Tropical Shorts: $120

In addition to all this, ShopBop is having a MEGA SALE! Basically the entire site is 20% off for the next 3 days, and you can use the code BIGEVENT to get the discount at checkout. HERE.

Have a great day everyone!

It’s a rather spectacular weekend here in NYC, hope you are having a great one too!

(Photos were taken on The Highline in Chelsea.)

I missed the press preview of Kips Bay this year, which means I don’t have any of my own photos to show you. I had to glean photos from other websites, but since I haven’t gone to the show yet, I feel like we are all in the same boat in terms of formulating an opinion on it.

A living room by Drake Design.

So this was the 40th Anniversary of Kips Bay Decorator Showhouse. Every year, a townhouse or brownstone thats for sale is usually transformed for the show. This year, there were apparently no townhouses available and so they used two duplexes in the  Aldyn, a new high rise on the West Side.

Raji Radhakrishnan/Raji RM and Associates.

All the decorators were stumped as to how to go about decorating huge white cubes with 20 foot ceilings, panoramic views, soffits, bump outs, little or no architectural details and weird AC units that were apparently everywhere. In other words: The type of decorators that do Kips Bay do not particularly jive with the aesthetic of the raw space. They typically like elegant townhouse rooms, with a  few well placed windows, great architecture and lots of wall space for art. And they usually decorate in that very old school New-York-Decorator way: tons of fabric, rugs and stuff. Pile on the stuff.

I get that this is a show, I do. But one would think that rather than take a huge white box and try to make it feel like a regular show house, that they would maybe try to break the  mold a little and do something different? Like do you think that anyone who would actually buy a 15 million dollar penthouse duplex (instead of a townhouse, or prewar park avenue apartment) that looks like this would WANT their apartment to be decorated like this? I somehow don’t think so. (Sidenote: I would love to see what someone like Vicente Wolf would have done in here. He typically uses white walls and elegant spare and eclectic furniture, so I would love to see his take on something like this.) Someone buying a space like this would want something more contemporary, at least I think they would! And isn’t the first rule of design to not try to make something into something it’s not?

Todd Alexander Romano’s dining room might be the star of the show for me.

The rooms range from silly to beautiful – as in every Kips Bay. Granted, I haven’t been there yet, so I am relying on the angles of the photography to convey the sense of space in the room, which is never accurate. (Some of these photos are from the Times, and some are from Curbed, and they both have their shortcomings. The times are too cropped and small to get a sense of the space and the ones from Curbed need to be more crisp.)

A living room by the designer Brian del Toro, left. A room by Chuck Fischer Studio, right.

I think these two rooms are the right balance of elegant and “designer-y” and modern. I do love  a lot of the furniture and of course, I’m so into the heavy use of green throughout the house!

David Scott. Kips Bay always has specatular art. I love the modern painting over the traditional desk.

Another view of the Raji room and a living room by Bunny Williams. 

I included more photos and different views after the jump… What do you guys think of these rooms? Like I said, I need to see it in person before I pound my gavel and declare some of it tchotcke and overdecorated, but that’s my opinion based on the photos. Have I suddenly become a less is more person?

Thoughts?

Tom Filicia’s Foyer

A living room by Drake Design.

Alexa Hampton’s bedroom. – SERIOUSLY?

Brian del Toro’s room, another angle.

Charlotte Moss- I don’t even know what this is.

Charles Pavarini’s- no words.

Thoughts?

I donated this painting to an amazing event hosting by the Anti Defamation League called JustArt. It’s the ADL’s inaugural exhibition, a fundraiser and silent auction at the Benrimon Gallery celebrating the mission of the Anti-Defamation League.

For some reason, May is fundraiser month and so this is the second painting this WEEK that I’ve donated. Which should be fine right? Don’t I have 2 paintings laying around that I could donate? Well, the short answer is of course I do, but then when crunch time came around I g0t so nervous about it that I just made two new pieces.

In the studio before I delivered it.

And I’m so glad I did. I really love this new painting. Leandra gave me the idea to name all my paintings the mean things I say about them: “Looks like neon vomit”, ” Fucking horrible modern starry night”, and then this one: “Sidewalk Gum”. I was toying with “Gum on the bottom of my shoe” but ultimately decided on the more concise “Sidewalk Gum.” And while “Fucking horrible modern starry night” has subsequently been destroyed, and “Looks like neon vomit” never made it to the blog, I really actually like “Sidewalk Gum.” This one is good, and the sidewalky nature of the background is really the best part.

The event is sold out, but you can still buy limited tickets at the door, if you are so inclined.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Benrimon Contemporary Gallery
514 W. 24th Street
New York City

7:30 PM – 10:30 PM
VIP Reception: 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM

Exhibition will be open to the public from May 18 – May 20

OMG- my face is gigantic and on the cover of The D Pages, an online magazine about all things design! This is kind of insane. I’m still baffled that anyone anywhere gives a crap about what I have to say, let alone to make my face gigantic, put some Didot typeface over it and to interview me. I think we all have fantasies where we are starring in our own little mini-movie called Life, I’m just so shocked and flattered that all of you tune into my channel. THANK YOU!

Go read the interview HERE!