The Garden Studio – The Art Gallery
If you are an artist, you definitely need a studio where to create your artworks. But you may need one as well where to display your creations for the delight of your family or friends and as a preliminary to their showcasing in a real art gallery. Therefore, a garden studio would be invaluable not only as an artist studio but also as an art gallery.
But while not all of us are artists, all of us have items we cherish that we would like to display. And sometimes we either don’t have enough space in our house, or they wouldn’t match the overall design. On the other hand, not all of us have a house with several levels, being thus able to arrange our intended art gallery on staircase walls. Therefore, a garden studio could be that much needed place where to hang in frames the items we would like to see more often or to share with friends.
So if we don’t have our own paintings to hang or couldn’t afford the ones of our favorite artists, we may consider as art, in the unrestricted popular culture meaning, any item of significance. In our case, there are all those items preserving dear memories, from the covers of records listened to ‘religiously’ with our high school friends to the tickets for the movie we watched with our first boyfriend/girlfriend in the movie theater where we first kissed, in short our memorabilia. Needless to say, pictures of our family over time would be the most cherished. While we can display in our gallery pretty much any item that means something to us, it would be best to choose a theme – like special moments in our couple life or capital events in our children’ lives – than to mix personal history, other people’ artworks and sports memorabilia, for instance, in the same space.
Once we settled for a theme, we should be careful to avoid sunlight or too much heat in the art gallery space, because we don’t want colors to fade or our pictures to get yellow over time. While any garden studio is damp proofed, so humidity couldn’t harm our items, the light might be a problem, so we have to protect the space with proper curtains or blinds. Or we can just make use of proper mounting techniques, using high quality glass or acrylic to protect our items displayed.
The next step is placement. While usually hanging the items at eye level would do, we have to make sure beforehand that either the tops or bottoms of the separate items are aligned, otherwise risking an unbalanced overall look. Accurate measurements would be essential in this respect. At the same time, we have to make sure that frames match each other in terms of both style and color. And, unlike in a museum or in a regular art gallery that might be visited by anyone, we can now enjoy our art gallery for ourselves or invite the friends whose opinion matters to us.