Landscapes: The Final Frontier

(This is hanging in my living room. Jealous? Yes. Yes, you are.)

I've been obsessing over the artwork in my apartment lately. I rearranged and swapped out some photos above the couch a few months ago but I feel dissatisfied with the scale of the wall. Scale is something I give a lot of thought to and one aspect of home decorating that I feel is usually overlooked or blatantly ignored. Nothing annoys me more than a tiny picture on a big wall. The thing about scale is you really have to have a feel for the space and a lot of times, the wall will call for something really big and I find that people, myself included, are hesitant to make such a bold statement with artwork. It's so much easier to use a bunch of smaller prints and frames so you can change them with the seasons or your mood. They always add a sense of abundance, which automatically makes your space look more sophisticated, even if the frames are like fifty cents each at Ikea.

Every bedroom I have lived in since I was 10 involved some type of gallery-style collage of random postcards, photographs, ticket stubs, ribbons and prints which were in matching frames. They usually took over an entire wall.  My current configuration is a low key map of greenwich village noting all the french restaurants paired with some black and white photographs of Tina Fey dressed up as a playboy bunny and a mouseketeer. I know- strange- but it works.

Lately I have been thinking about landscapes. I've never been into them very much- probably because I don't really like The Nature. But I've been seeing them around on many a fashionable home design blog so maybe I should give them another chance.  Maybe I am missing out on the opportunity to add some pastoral calm to my otherwise hectic urban existence. It might be a nice sense of contrast.  Four years ago everyone I knew had some kind of  cityscape on their walls, as if they couldn't just walk out their door and see it for real. In a very Carrie Bradshaw way, I can't help but wonder- are landscapes the new cityscapes?

There are two ways to translate this idea into something awesome and amazing:

 1) Start a collection of vintage landscapes and fill an entire wall with them, like a bunch of little windows with views of fields and forests instead of the airshaft outside my building or the naked guy across the street.

2) Aquire photographs that actually look like real windows! This intrigues me. I  begged my sister, who is a pretty good photographer, to make some for me but she said no. Jerk.

Friends, what are your thoughts on the matter? Do I need to ignore my miniature chair collection for a while and concentrate on miniature landscapes? Do I attack Etsy with a vengeance and bombard my roommate with nutburger decisions like: mountains vs. tundra? Or do I just calm myself down and do the resourceful, fiscally responsible thing and recycle some of my old artwork that is currently hiding underneath my bed?

Images: vogue and isuwanee