Liz Barber: Abstracting the Elements

What happens when you ask two lovely blonde, talented abstract artists to commit to a show at the gallery?  We get the honor and pleasure of curating a weekend-long event for the incomparable Melissa Payne Baker and Liz Barber – and you get to feast your eyes on a gorgeous array of spectacularly created paintings.

First of all, mark your calendars for Friday, October 18th and Saturday, October 19th because we’ll be sharing the inspiration, creativity and hard work of these two wonderful painters and friends.  We’ll unveil the show to the public on Friday night from 6-8. And on Saturday, Baker & Barber will go head-to-head in an event we’re jokingly calling the Dueling Demos. Both artists will be on hand, painting up a storm and chatting with viewers.  It’s going to be fabulous.  Here’s a teeny little glimpse of what’ll be hanging on the walls:

Liz Barber, Promise of Spring (24 x 24, mixed media on canvas)

Melissa Payne Baker’s The Present (48 x 24, mixed media on canvas) will be present at the show…

It takes a lot of work to put on a show. The artists spend months developing their inspiration for a new body of work and then creating and painting like crazy.  We spend months promoting and publicizing the show. And, as it gets closer we get to do something really fun: visit the painters in their studios for a little sneak peek at the work and the direction it’s taking.   So we were excited when Liz Barber invited us to stop by to take a look at what she was cooking up for the show.

Liz’s tools of the trade at her studio.

Tubes of paint…

 

Rows of pastels…

Our adorable gallery manager, Linda,  studying one of Liz’s newest pieces.

But first, all little history about Liz.  To be completely honest, the great relationship we have with her got off to a rather rocky start.  Years ago when Liz approached us, we were thrilled to have this new artist with us at the gallery and we couldn’t wait to start exhibiting and selling her large splashy abstracted florals.  She’d been selling these very successfully for a while and we were all completely convinced that our clients would respond ecstatically and that we were all a perfect fit.  The Summerhouse, below, was one of those earlier paintings.  We loved Liz’s trademark energy and her clever use of medium.

As life and luck would have it, the minute Liz started showing at the gallery, her sales ground to a halt.  It’s not completely uncommon for that to happen but we were stumped. Was it us? Was it the gallery? Why weren’t these gorgeous pieces selling the way they should be?

And that’s when (for the millionth time), we realized how crucial collaboration is – and that a successful gallery/artist relationship is based on frank conversation and the artist’s ability to translate inspiration and direction onto the canvas.  It goes without saying that Liz, of course, was her usual gracious self.  She headed back to her studio and got busy creating a new body of work specifically for our gallery and clients.  We heaved a sigh of relief and thanked our lucky stars that LIz was so dedicated, hard-working and committed to her craft.

Oh and what glorious new work it was!  Softly fractured angles, circles and abstracted shapes became her focus, all beautifully rendered in a gorgeous palette that had depth and power.  It felt fresh, new and different but we especially loved the way Liz was able to convey her innate love of nature which had always been a source of inspiration for her.  She told us, “My mother loved to garden and I was surrounded by flowers and plants my whole childhood. I was happiest outside in the sunlight and I paint from the perspective of capturing a memory of the way light moves.”

Liz begins moving in a new direction. Posies, 24 x 24.

We were delighted beyond words, hung the work and watched it fly off the walls again and again and again.  Bingo!

One of Liz’s first evolutions.  River Stones.

 

We loved watching Liz develop this new body of work. Here’s another version of River Stones, 36 x 36.

The work grew into this style. “Rise to the Surface.”

 We love Liz and her quiet, elegant sensibility.  She works efficiently and confidently and the results are simply stunning.  She uses a soft palette of colors with vigorous brushstrokes to create paintings that convey nature and light as constantly changing, shifting and moving.

 

We loved this painting. It just bursts with energy and movement but somehow we find it calming and serene at the same time. The Sun, 12 x 12.

 Her evocative atmospheric landscapes tell a short story by freezing a moment in time and then deftly abstracting all the elements.  The common thread that winds itself through her work is her uncanny ability to capture a light source through its interaction with color.  The results are glowing, luminous, enhanced pictures of the gorgeous effects of nature.

Another rendition of The Sun series. The palette has us drooling.

And although she’s blessed with oodles of innate talent, Liz has also worked hard to learn her craft.  She studied painting at the University of Massachusetts and Moore College of Art in Philadelphia and we’re so proud of her success in the art world.  She has loads of local fans as well as plenty up and down the East Coast, from Florida to New York.

We’re thrilled about this show and can’t wait to show off, brag and boast about Liz and Melissa.  We hope you’ll join us to meet these two lovely ladies and enjoy the fruits of their hard work, inspiration and limitless creativity.

And, of course, we can’t sign off without a couple more peeks at what’s to come from Liz:

 Delicate Dance, 24 x 48, mixed media.

 

Fragile Balance of Spring, 30 x 40, mixed media.

Summer’s Perennial Grace, 30 x 40, mixed media.

Ta ta.

(p.s.: stay tuned. We just visited Melissa Payne Baker in her studio and will share that with you soon.)

Cote de Texas, Merci!

 

Happy roses on the terrace at Les Murets.  Don’t ask Sam about this though!

We just returned from the most amazing two weeks in Paris and Provence with the loveliest group of ladies … and then we had to pinch ourselves, because our favorite blogger, Joni Webb of  Cote de Texas, wrote a fabulous blog about our trips to Les Murets , and we got to relive everything all over again. It’s called, “Do you need a place to stay in France” and the rest is history!
You can read the Cote de Texas blog here.

Reading Joni’s beautifully written and thoroughly researched blog, which is mostly about the redesign of Les Murets, reminded me of the days when we actually “suffered through” the renovation – when I  begged Meg for a few day’s off and subjected Sam Jones, our in-house designer extraordinaire (who is singly responsible for my perusing real estate listings because we have SO MUCH FUN renovating houses together!) to round the clock labor for 6 days straight , at Les Murets in Gordes, France.

For those of you who will go on and read Joni’s wonderful blog, just remember that the end result wasn’t always rosy.  Just take a look at my sweet house when the outside walls were crumbling from terrible water damage and the roof needed to be replaced, along with the stucco resurfaced!  Oh, it pains me to see this photo!

 

The outside of Les Murets, prior to a new roof, new stucco, and new paint color!

And even worse is the memory of our rushing to choose the stucco and shutter color, which are so essential in the overall look of a house, from the teeniest little sample.  For some unknown reason, we couldn’t get our contractor to give us paint samples so we made a monumental decision from the most minimal paint chips.

 

Yes that’s Sam holding up the lone little paint chips that were all we had to work with to blindly pick the entire color of the house, shutters and trim!

It wasn’t without many sleepless nights that I returned, a month later, holding my breath, to the complete and utter realization that with Sam’s help, and a lot of luck, we had  totally nailed the paint color!  I can’t tell you what it is … but I love it every time I see it!

Ahhh … what a relief that it turned out to be the right color!

 While Joni will take you through “before and afters” that chronicle the house’s sad state when we  bought it to its subsequent happy renovation, I’m just a little embarrassed to show you my own early decorating snafus, BS (before Sam), and prior to our most recent redo. And to think this room wasn’t even on the agenda for a make-over.

 I’m sure it didn’t really look as bad as this photo, honest!

 

 Our dramatic quick change … thanks to a fun local fabric store, Ikea, and some great little finds from the antiques capital of the world at Isle sur la Sorgue!

And that’s probably one of the reasons I love working so much with Sam Jones.  I knew I didn’t love the decor  but I wasn’t sure why, and I certainly didn’t have the energy or conviction to fix it.  When Sam got involved, there was no stopping her.  Plus she has this uncanny secret weapon of always making you feel like it’s your wonderful idea, which magically turns the whole process, along with the adrenaline rush and sleepless nights, into pure fun.

What started as one tiny project,  of adding an upstairs bedroom, snowballed into a huge effort that completely tore the whole house apart – and had the two of us working non-stop, pretty much 24 hour days, until it all came together, as viewed in Joni’s beautiful blog.

So for all of you who have ever considered undertaking a renovation, just know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.   And while I hope you will enjoy Cote de Texas’ generous blog about the beauty of Les Murets (for which I am very grateful!), just  remember that it took two crazy ladies, six sleepless nights, and acres of grey paint and “stitch witchery” for the house to go from  this:

 I think we swore we would never show this picture … but truly, this is what the living room looked like, half way through our week! Notice the ironing board which was “stich witchery” central!

To this!

 

 Ta da!  With just 5 minutes to spare before we had to leave for the train … at 7 a.m.!

Happy reading!  Enjoy the wonderful blog from Cote de Texas. And feel free to leave a nice comment for Joni.  We love her!!

Ta ta …

HH

PS  Oh and by the way, please don’t ask Sam Jones about the view of the Luberon valley (since she never got to see it) or the delicious restaurants in Gordes that she never got to eat in. She is still complaining about that!

Getting Goodies in Gordes

 

 The ever jaw-dropping entrance to Gordes in Provence

 It’s been almost a year in the making, but one of our Paris Provence trips kicked off today in Provence, and the other one is kicking off Friday in Paris!  It’s an exciting time for us although a huge lesson in coordination.  Luckily, some of us are more organized than others (not me!) and so between us, we hope we’ve covered all the bases.

 

 Linda loves figs more than anything and she said these were so sweet, they tasted like fig newtons!

The fun part started for me a few days ago.  I’m the lucky one who got to prep the house for the prep.  I arrived to glorious sunshine on Saturday, and just had to prep and fluff for Linda’s arrival.  Then Linda breezed in with more gorgeous weather in tow, and the two of us set about to prep and fluff for the week of ladies:  It’s a great and eclectic group that spans four decades, includes two mother and daughter combos, and has a smattering of northern and southerners.

My first stop, when I arrived, was to one of the local farmer’s markets, where I found fruits and veggies that I knew Linda would love.

 Do you know about this sweet delicacy, Cavaillon melons? And the price? 10 euros for the entire plateau. Take that, Paris!

 A little display of Linda’s favorite things to greet her upon her arrival, including the happiest sunflowers!

Then, after she arrived, we went to the fabulous Gordes market and stocked up on more goodies for our girls.

It was a lot to carry, but we managed … and then we had to take the requisite photo to document it.  Ooh la la, will this be enough wine for the week?  Doubt it!

 

 We’ll take three bottles of this, four bottles of that, 6 bottles of this one over here … and yes, that should get us through the first night or two!

 Wedding reception anyone?

 

 We love to give our ladies lavender sachets … and this is one of our favorite vendors in Gordes.

 Oh and let’s also tuck a little sweet smelling soap into their welcome “kit.” It will make their suitcases smell so good!

 We were lucky to find the prettiest monograms for our lavender sachets … and luckily we got everyone’s initial!

 

 Oops, we’ve bought a little more than we’d planned. It may be time for a new market basket (or two!).

 

 It’s so tempting to stock up on pottery, especially these adorable shapes and colors.

 Obviously, with all this hard work, a girl’s gotta eat … so we headed to one of our top favorite restaurants in the area, Le Jardin du Quai, and indulged Chef Hebet’s wonderful menu of fresh ingredients cooked to perfection.

 

 We just love everything about the restaurant at Jardin du Quai, especially the garden setting.

 

 Cheers Madame, and has anyone ever kept track of how many of these poses we now have?

Then it was just one more stop, to the florist for a couple of welcome bouquets:

 

 Ahhh … just love the cabbage roses.

And a touch of color to brighten the living room.

Is our driver booked every day?  Check. Are our restaurant reservations all made (it’s not always easy to get in to some of our favorites, like the Bistrot du Paradou or Le Fournil in Bonnieux).  Check.  Are the rooms pretty, prepped and welcoming to our ladies? Check!

 We know someone will sleep very soundly in this bed tonight! Notice the foutah at the foot of the bed. They’ve replaced all of our pool towels at Les Murets, and we just love them. They get softer with every wash.

 

 Bienvenue! Welcome!

Is the terrace welcoming and ready for the big arrival? Check. After all the t’s have been crossed, the i’s dotted and the checks checked, it’s time for me, sadly to depart.  Because we get to do this fun check list all over again in Paris, as we await another group of ladies from the U.S. in Paris, before the giant change over on Monday, when they go to Provence with Meg and Linda brings her group to Paris!  Oh it is complicated.  And there will be lots more to organize in the next two days with Meg.  But somehow I don’t expect anyone to feel to sorry for us.  We love these trips for everything that they give us:  A chance to bond with new friends, a way to show off some of our favorite parts of the world, and an opportunity to get away and see what’s out there …. that might catch our attention for the store or the gallery.

So how’s Linda doing, greeting the group in Gordes?  Looking good! One mother daughter team has just arrived, and another guest has already dipped her feet in the pool.

 The first adorable mother/daughter team and our fabulous driver Christophe, in his colorful converses and his signature Lacoste shirt. We are soooo lucky to have him!

 Aaah …La vie est belle! We hope you have a wonderful week in Provence and Paris!

 Check, check!  Can’t wait to see these ladies in Paris in a few days!

Ta ta,

HH

We're Live...For Real!

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last 18 months it’s that the minute you think you have it all figured it out, it’s time to change, catch up and adapt.  It’s an understatement to say this keeps us on our toes…but we thrive on this sort of stuff, so it’s fun.

Such is the story of our little website. If you’ve been following us since we were just a fine art gallery, you might remember the first rendition of our website. Ann, who is very tech-y and has a great sense of media design, literally generated the first go-around of our site all by herself.  It was wonderful.  If you were viewing art, it was easy to see images and get information. Behind the curtain, it was a breeze for us to update and manage.  All we had to do was some clicking on the keyboard and images miraculously appeared clearly on the screen.  There was plenty of room to add our little messages and gallery news and we had great fun with that. So we all happily cruised along for a good many years with Huff Harrington Part One.

Remember this?

 Fast forward five years later to the opening of Huff Harrington Home…and our frantic realization that we really needed a multi-faceted website to handle all the product we were offering at the store. We had fine art from the gallery side and then a myriad of product from the Home side.  What do to? We put our heads and hearts into it and hired a talented outside team to help us design Huff Harrington Part Deux. (We had gotten a glowing recommendation on Mara and Kristi of Works-Progress from one of our favorite authors, New York Times best-seller, Emily Giffin.)

We had a blast coming up with the creative part and spent hours and hours agonizing over cute icons and logos that perfectly summed up who and what we are.  We didn’t want to be too serious, but we didn’t want to be too frivolous, either.

 Our designers came up with these adorable icons that we fell in love with.  Meg’s on the left and Ann’s on the right.

 

This little chair is perfect as the icon for the store.

 

A cute frame pops up for the gallery.

 And just like any other proud parents, we have now thankfully forgotten the painful first round of photography that didn’t quite mesh with what we envisioned in our heads.  We’ve also glossed over the endless cropping and re-sizing of images that seemed to go on for days on end.  We finally started to get the hang of it and the result was beautiful, really capturing our personality and our vision for the branding of Huff Harrington.

 

 Our site’s home page. We’ve always loved the elegant imagery and clean white space.

It worked well for a while but then we started noticing little glitches that we didn’t just love.  The art had become a hyper-sensitive sliding screen show and I, for one, could never manage to get my mouse exactly where I needed it to be to view a painting.  We had too many messages bombarding our viewers.  And, although it was absolutely gorgeous, we felt it was a little clunky and hard to move around.  In the back of our minds, we were both thinking “uh-oh….”

And now a little backtrack:  in December, right after the blur of the holiday shopping season had passed and we actually had a couple days to recover, we assigned each other a homework project:  pour yourself a big glass of wine and write down our goals and objectives for 2013.  Since we’re basically always on the same page, it wasn’t a surprise that we both listed “E-Commerce!” as something we wanted to get up and running this year.

 

Our very important annual board meeting.

Guess what that meant? A whole new website designed specifically for e-commerce and the easy-peasy click of a button to purchase whatever it is that captures your fancy.  Sounds like a breeze, right?

 

It was high time to get into e-commerce even if we did go kicking and screaming…

So, it was back to the drawing board….and the stark realization that we had to upload literally every single item we were planning  on selling.  Oh, and re-photograph it, too and make sure item numbers, prices and quantities were correct. And then because we like to give as much information and character as we can to anything we do, we had to go through every item and write a fun description.

 

 One of the never-ending descriptions we wrote over the course of a month or two.

 It doesn't sound like much but we knew we were in for the long haul when we hit 2,000 skus on our inventory.  And don’t get us wrong. We both love to write but after a few weeks of mind-numbing descriptions, we started mumbling “we simply couldn’t resist this 19th century something-something-something” or “add a little ooh-la-la with this one of a kind…” in our sleep.  You get the picture.

 

 Luckily, we had our secret weapon lurking in the back office with us: smart, efficient and adorable Emily who’s been with us since before we opened our doors to HHH.  She’s an excellent and clever writer, knows all there is to know about managing social media and such and it was no surprise to anyone that we happily promoted her to help us with marketing the gallery and the store.  But it didn’t take her long to start mumbling in her sleep either and we all started talking just like our descriptions on the website.

 Emily has been spending the last few months measuring, measuring and measuring.

In the meantime, we were fretting about the idea of giving our e-commerce website a little personality.  After all, we like having fun and think that’s an important part of who we are. Struggle as we did, we just couldn’t come up with the right personality for our e-commerce.  Was it a little character called “Shoppy”? Was our cute little bag icon cute and easy to understand? In the end, we decided on our adorable shopping bag icon as the clickable front door to our site.  But there were plenty of sleepness nights.

 Click here and Shop will get you straight to Huff Harrington!

While all that was going on, we had lots of boring financial stuff to figure out (including a couple 4 a.m. wake-ups thinking “Oh no! Did I give them the right account number for the websales??!!”  Of course we did, but you know how it is at 4 a.m.

 For a while there our days were starting at 4 a.m. with racing minds and panic attacks about all the little things we were afraid we forgot. Luckily there weren’t many.

The whole time, our quiet and supremely efficient and capable web-designers, Mara and Kristi were calmly holding our hands.  We kept begging for one more day to fix an image, or another couple hours to repair some copy on a description.  Finally, they had enough of our whining.  ”You’re never really ready. It’s like having kids,” they told us.  ”Just hit the GO button and be done with it!”  So we took a huge, deep breath and said “GO!”

Before we announced it to the world, we decided to very, very quietly go live and figured we had some time to check and double-check that everything was working the way it should.  We ran some test sales.  And then, when we were least expecting it, we got our very first web sale and we were ecstatic.  We actually had the product in stock and…that’s when we came to a rumbling stop.  Aggghhh!  The control key we needed to use on our point-of-sale system had mysteriously disappeared so we couldn’t clear the sale through inventory.  We hadn’t gotten the correct link from UPS to begin our service with them.  But it was great because we were able to work a couple kinks out.  Two steps forward…

 

 Our very first web order is for one of our favorite products: the Laduree bath line. We’re one of a handful of retailers in the U.S. Ohh la la!  Our lovely customer is as crazy about them as we are.

And then today: in the very hours before we announce our cute new site, we beg our accommodating designers for one more thing: a little banner proclaiming we’re live.  They, of course, oblige…and the banner is there in top left corner wherever you are on the website. How smart is that?!  This is a screen shot, but please, please check out the real thing!

 

 At the last minute before announcing our new site, we begged for a little banner that would announce our e-commerce arrival.

So you get the idea.  Unlike your kids, whom you basically love all the time, we tend to love the website one minute and hate it the next.  But we figure we’re stuck with each other for the foreseeable future so we better learn to get along.

So, please…click here to arrive at our new shopping site.  Have a browse and let us know what you think. We hope you have positive and happy comments but we’ll take the criticisms very maturely and hopefully learn from them.  In the meantime, huffharrington.com is still our little baby and we love it to death. And we hope you do, too!

Ta ta.