I will admit that I have not felt the urgency to settle in to this apartment. It may be that I am road-weary from having lived in three apartments in one year. I feel that the next move is always right around the corner - why get comfortable? But chances are we will be in this apartment for a year or two, so it was time to make the place feel more like home.
The easiest way to warm up our cookie-cutter, beige walls-on-beige carpet apartment was to hang the artwork and photographs we have collected over the years. How to fit it all in? Our walls were large, but our art was plentiful. Luckily, I'm a sucker for a good gallery wall.
My friend recently put together a gallery wall in her new Denver apartment. On her blog, she wisely calls it the family memory wall. It includes photographs, meaningful song lyrics, a letter her husband wrote to her when they were 14 years old (oh my gosh, awwww, right?), her Chicago Marathon finisher medal and other items that hold personal value to them as a family.
In our Chicago apartment we had a wall of black and white photographs, mostly from our then-recent wedding. Because we are now living in a very blank space, I thought black and white photos would be too stark. Besides, we have so many great pieces that we have collected, been gifted, made, or inherited. Each of these pieces hold such meaning to us for different reasons. So this is our memory wall:
- This photograph was given to me by my aunt and is of my grandfather's family. He is just a little boy, and you can barely see him sitting at the far end of the table.
- A reproduction of a painting hubs fell in love with when we lived in Chicago. The artist, Bruce Holwerda, frequently showed his work at a gallery up the street from our apartment, and we would see this painting as we'd walk home from dinner or the grocery store. My sister and her boyfriend gave us a reproduction for Christmas the year before we moved out of Chicago.
- Two paintings by Chicago artist Nancy Rosen. Nancy is a good friend of a good friend. She is a great artist and fabulous person.
- One of my most beloved items - the thing that I would grab if my house were on fire - a painting by my grandmother. This painting sat on the top of a bookcase in my parents' room for my entire childhood. I would look at it when my mom would brush and blowdry my hair at night, when we'd open stockings in their room on Christmas morning, or after borrowing a necklace off of my mom's jewelry stand. Three years ago, my mom had the painting framed and gave it to me for Christmas. I forget if I got anything else that morning. It doesn't matter.
- A painting I did in high school. I love it and it picks up the color of the quilt we have on our bed.
- I made this painting/collage for hubs just a couple weeks after we started dating. It incorporates pictures of items that were already meaningful to us in that short time: a coffee advertisement, a science textbook, a picture of an airplane. It also includes part of Pablo Neruda's Sonnet XVII ("I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where..."), which three years later would be read at our wedding.
- I gave this print to hubs on our first anniversary. It is by artist Brian Andreas and is titled One of Us.
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