The Lovely Red Fox: Gallery Wall Dreams

As you may or may not have noticed from my previous updates on the progress of our living room or various styling posts, there has been an area of our living room I've been hiding from you, folks. There may have been a glimpse of it in the original "embarking on the living room" post, but for the most part I haven't wanted to show you guys what it looks like, because, well, it really doesn't look a whole lot different than that original photo that was taken, oh I don't know, NINE MONTHS AGO. Whole baby humans have been grown across the world since I told you there was going to be magnificent things happening with our living room, and almost nothing has changed with our TV wall. I mean it's only the one part of the room we face pretty much all the time, and it's not like its the very first thing anyone sees when entering our apartment (please detect any and all sarcasm in that sentence). So here it is in all its glory:

Not to say that I haven't had some design dreams about this beast. I think actually, that the reason nothing has happened here is because I'm really pretty terrified of messing it up, or investing a lot of time/ money into it and then making a mistake. And the idea of that being the thing that holds me
back is actually pretty ironic seeing as I've always had a pet peeve for pictures waiting to be hung. Why wait months thinking about hanging it? Just put the dang picture on the wall and be done with it. There's always spackle if you change your mind. Just do it.

So I guess my main affliction with our little gallery wall pipe dream is the actual art purchases. I have hung a lot of framed and unframed objects, having majored in fine art, but most of that was my own work that I was in total control of size, paper, etc. It's a lot more daunting collecting art. There are so many questions running through my head. Where do I find the things I'm looking for? What kinds of things am I looking for? What frames should I use? What size art? What colors? Do I add some sculptural things? A shelf? A plant? Canvas? How much should I spend? Should I make mock ups of everything and try laying it out before I even order anything? You can see the turmoil.

After quite a few manic internet searching sessions, and numerous mockups (each of which I made a grandiose presentation of to Drew, who repeatedly told me they were all fine, though I just wasn't quite sure), I came up with the below mockup. Now, I'm not even sure if I like this, in fact, I'm pretty sure I'm going to have another 5 mockups by next week, but I think I'm finally getting somewhere.

Before thinking in terms of a gallery wall and a cohesive style for the living room, I hadn't been very introspective about the type of art I liked to collect. Mostly because I realized I've not bought a lot of art. So this was very interesting going at this from the standpoint of putting together a collection of art from different sources that all speak to each other and balance with color, weight, visual composition, and and theme. In my current line of work I deal with composition daily, and in fact I've pretty much been honing "composition skills" for the past 7 years of my life, through design, photography, merchandising, and you could even go further back than that if you want to count my years of relentless manic scrapbooking (you don't even want to know, pretty much anyone I went to high school with can vouch for this). The difference is, with merchandising in particular, I use what is given to me to make the best presentation. The buying, the planning of merchandise is already done, and I can pick and choose what I want from what there is to work with. With this there are just SO MANY POSSIBILITIES, and it's difficult to decide what to use! There are a few "for sure" pieces though, that I am so excited about. My favorite is "The Beginning" by Christian Schloe (farthest left), which will be the largest in the collection, and probably a canvas print, closely followed by the "Sea Wave" by Bree Madden (the giant wave, in case that wasn't clear). I love these two pieces and I feel like they are very rich and dynamic with each other and will pull the wall together as a whole.

On the whole, I'm very excited to continue making this gallery wall dream into a reality. I continue to change the composition up in my head daily, and I'm pulling from a lot of inspirational gallery walls on Pinterest. Check out some of my favorites below!