Art Obsession

As many of you know, we recently relocated to a new neighborhood in Seattle -- we're now in Capitol Hill, in what has become dubbed the "Pike/Pink Corridor," home to a wide range of new restaurants, residential developments, and independent retailers and creative types.

One such creative type has since become a minor obsession with me. Conveniently located adjacent to the local cupcake bakery (which, as you might imagine, I see an awful lot of), artist Cassandria Blackmore's studio has a streetfront gallery of sorts to show off recent works.

She practices reverse painting on glass, which she then shatters so that it fragments in unpredictable ways. Tackling both figurative and abstract subjects, I am blown away by the beauty and intensity of her abstract work, which lines the showroom walls:

Her figurative work is equally impressive:

...but it's those shots of color, woven beneath the shiny, fractured glass, that make my heart race. I haven't unearthed any prices in my investigative work, so I'm inclined to reference the old adage: If you have to ask, you probably can't afford it.

I'd love to use the orange or blue over the fireplace in a current project, in which we've done two oversized slipper chairs in this, Quadrille's "Contessa," flanking an orange ostrich-print ottoman:

If (I mean WHEN) I am published in House Beautiful or Elle Decor, one of those is going up on my wall. Budget be damned!