For a change I went to a Design Meetup that featured Rachel Ashwell of Shabby Chic fame. The meetup was also featured on the ApartmentTherapy.com Website and was well attended (and I ran into one familiar face, @laidbackchick goes to design meetups like this one, often).

The more Rachel Ashwell talked about her artistic approach (and launching a new New York Showroom on Mercer Street), the more I was reminded that it’s important to have a sense of playfulness in Art, Design and Analytics.   Yes, Analytics.

What hit home was Rachel’s description of her relationship with Target, the large department store, and how Target let Rachel Ashwell be Rachel Ashwell, including running her shops (with, it was pointed out, allows her to get the inspiration to create the designs that are in department stores.

Every object in her showroom was stamped with a distinctive personality, hers – and was chosen – it may have been brik o’ brac, or some other furniture her company found or created, but it has a distinctive look that becomes even more distinctive as she spoke about it.

And that brings me to the point of this post – almost any object found in nature could be, and is Art, because it was ideated by the Creator (or God, whatever you want to call it) but it’s often puzzled me that we take old, worn down objects, like a rusted door (often found in warehouses, factories, etc) and hang it on a white wall, and suddenly it appears as Art.   Same thing happened to me tonight as I left the Design Meetup and went to a nearby cafe for a bio break – I saw a bunch of graffiti scribbles on the wall that did the same push and pull, shallow space depth effect that Jackson Pollack’s large paintings at MOMA do … if I cut out the wall and transplanted it at MOMA, would it impress me as much as Jackson Pollack’s paintings?

Maybe … Maybe it would  – maybe almost any object can be made to look like a masterpiece if framed properly – but does that make an object worthy to be in a museum -does it belong there?

There’s two forces at work – and they both are at odds with each other.  The first force, or idea, is that we have work hard at perfecting a skill, and then learning to mask it, in order to create Art, or Design, or, in fact, anything professional. The other force at play – that things are inherently perfect and we just have to be ourselves and let creativity flow – and masterpieces just “materialize”.

My guess is that reality lies in between those two “opposites” , but as I think of  Rachel Ashwell of Shabby Chic – that she finds a lot of second hand and old objects, and reworks them, or restores some beauty they lost,  I’m temped to think that creativity is more like being a “curator” of nature and experience.

In other words, we don’t create anything (the Creator has done that for us, already) we just “select” and arrange what we selected, and in that, there is Art. – definitely Shabby Chic’s Art.