Somewhere there is a room that is nearly finished. The furniture is in, the paint is dry, and one wall is still waiting.
It might be a client's living room, an office lobby, or a guest room at your inn. It might be your own house. Either way you know the feeling: the room works, but it does not yet feel like anyone's.
The part of the job nobody talks about
If you choose art for rooms, you know how the search goes. You scroll. You save a few. Then you start again for the next room, and the one after that.
Somewhere past the thousandth picture they all begin to look alike, and the safe choice starts to look like the only one: the print everybody has, the one that could hang in any room because it belongs to none of them.
The budget is set and the deadline is close, and a wall cannot be finished with "nearly right".
What I learned photographing other people's rooms
Before I made art, I was an architectural photographer. My job was to make a finished room look the way it feels to stand in it, and that work appeared in Architectural Digest, Fine Homebuilding and Green Building.
The aim has not changed since my years photographing rooms: an image should complement the space it hangs in, and make it better.
Then one long winter day I pointed the camera at something very small: light passing through a handblown glass ornament, from so close that the object itself disappeared. What came back was colour and light I had not seen before, and no two frames were alike. Everything I make now began there.
In 2012 I founded Artworks and The Art Drop Shop Gallery, to help people find art that suits the room it will live in. That is still the whole idea.
Why there is a Discount Club
The Club is for anyone who chooses art for rooms, from one wall to a whole building. It gives you 15% to 25% off my prints, so you have a steady source of art that is distinctive, well made and affordable, without starting the search from nothing each time.
Why one piece is rarely the whole answer
A single piece can hold a wall. But a room is rarely one wall, and a home is rarely one room.
A long wall asks for more than one
Over a seven-foot sofa, art should be about 56 to 63 inches wide. That can be one large piece, or two or three that hang 2 to 3 inches apart and read as one. A pair or a row also suits the walls a single piece cannot: a long hallway, a stairwell, the space above a headboard.
Pieces that share something make a room look chosen
When the pieces in a room share one thing, a colour family, a subject or a shape, the room stops looking like a set of separate purchases and starts to look like a decision. Order them in the same material and the same frame, and they read as a set.
One thread through the whole house
Where one room opens into the next, the same colours carried from the living room into the dining room and down the hall make the house feel like one place. For an inn or a rental, it is how every guest room can belong to the same place.
It is easier from one place
Every piece here is filed by subject, colour and shape, so the collections and the Gallery can pull pieces that belong together, and you can see each one on a wall at its real size, or in a photo of your own room, before you buy. The Club's 15% to 25% off matters most when there is more than one wall to finish.
Who it is for
- Interior designers, who need art that belongs to this client's room, not to every room.
- Home and office decorators, finishing a space on a budget and a deadline.
- Corporate art buyers, with a lobby, a hallway and a floor of offices that should feel like one place.
- Art consultants, looking for work their clients have not already seen everywhere.
- Owners of lodges, inns and holiday rentals, whose rooms should feel like the place they stand in. My landscapes are named places in the Methow Valley and the North Cascades.
- Homeowners who love art, whether it is one wall or the whole house.
The questions that come up
Will it be the right size?
Every piece on this site can be seen on a wall at its real size: over a sofa, a bed, a sideboard or a desk, in photos of real rooms, or in a photo of your own wall. Each one shows the largest size it prints at well. My prints hang in homes in 17 states and the UK, some of them six feet wide.
Has the work hung in rooms like mine?
It has hung in galleries, corporate offices, hotels, rental properties and private homes, including the Hotel Rio Vista in Winthrop. My friend Garth Mudge, who blows the glass I photograph, hangs my prints in his shop at Glassworks in Winthrop and took almost twenty pieces for his home, office and store.
The day the wall is finished
Picture the room again, finished. The wall holds something chosen for that room. And when someone asks where it came from, there is a story to tell: a piece of handblown glass, photographed from a thumb's width away, or a river you can stand beside in the Methow Valley.
The Club is how I make that easier, for the people who do this for a living and for everyone who simply loves art on their walls.