Jean Therapy

What do you do with that pile of worn out denim jeans in your closet? The ones that are ripped, and not in a cool, carefully distressed way? Reincarnate them perhaps as upcycled art? That's the unique vision of photographer and printer Matt Shapoff of Handmade On Peconic Bay, who's know for creating unique modern prints, stationary and textile accessories, using 19th photographic techniques.

This weekend Matt unveils his newest collection, in collaboration with über kreativ Montauk textile artist Anne Drager, and the results are nothing short of 1960's Woodstock flower child meets BoHo chic. The abstract patched denim and cyanotype printed textile throw pillows will look equally as home in your prefab Leisurama weekend getaway, as they will in your Williamsburg glass power tower. See the entire collection here.

Anne Drager for Handmade On Peconic Bay one of a kind upcycled denim and cyanotype patched throw pillows, available exclusively at Artists & Fleas. Custom work available on request (just bring us your old denim and Matt + Anne will create something special, just for you).

Dog Show!

Matt Shapoff, "Helper Dog Cyanotype No. 321", 2010

Mascot Studio

Katherine Streeter

I can't think of a better way to spend Valentine's Day, than celebrating our four legged loved ones at Mascot's Studio's annual Dog Show. Dogs don't need a pedigree or agility training to be included in dog artist extraordinaire slash gallery owner Peter McCaffrey's show, just a great image. Attend the opening night reception in Mascot's cozy East Village gallery, or peruse the pup art at your leisure from February 14th to March 31st. With all these talented canine artists, you'll be hard pressed to choose a "Best in Show"!

The 12th Annual Dog Show
Feb 14th - Mar 31st
Opening; Valentine's Day 7-9pm

Mascot Studio
328 East 9th Street
New York, NY 10003
212.228.9090

Silk Impressions

My husband, Matt Shapoff, is a scientist who filed for a patent when he was 16 years old, and an artist-photographer, with a predilection for vintage hand mixed photochemistry recipes.

So three years ago, when a friend suggested that Matt’s experiments in alternative photography would make great product designs, it took me about 30 seconds to say “Let me make a logo and some packaging!”. Handmade On Peconic Bay was born that day, and has grown to become a full line of modern vintage goods, using 19th century photographic processes to create art prints, note cards, and our latest addition, cyanotype silk scarves.

The scarves, which are not dyed, are one of a kind photographic prints on silk. The iron-cyanide based photochemistry is applied to the fabric, turning it Prussian blue as it oxidizes in the sun, and leaving behind a stark white impression on the silk, of the objects that were arranged on it. Read more about the scarves on ecco*eco and Hand/Eye.

Here's a cool video of Matt making a feather scarf.

Click To Play

Handmade On Peconic Bay cyanotype silk scaves are available at Hester Street Fair, weekends through December. Check the HMPB Facebook page for upcoming dates.

What's Old Is New

Art print note cards

Van Dyke Brown prints

Cyanotype prints

Cynthia Rybakoff-Shapoff

Matt Shapoff

Hester Street Fair, located in a beautiful park setting on the corner of Hester and Essex, was once home to New York City’s largest and oldest pushcart markets. Established in 1894, it was was the busiest outdoor market in New York City, by the turn of the century. The new Hester Street Fair has sought to create a space that reflects the dynamic energy of the Lower East Side then and now. Mission accomplished! If you haven't been yet, make a point of visiting soon.

Today, the Hester Street Fair focuses on curated local crafts, artisan food and vintage goods. It's the perfect place for our Handmade On Peconic Bay modern vintage wares, including cyanotype and Van Dyke Brown photographic prints using techniques that date back to the mid 19th century.

Handmade On Peconic Bay will be at the Hester Street Fair weekends through December. For fair dates and announcements, follow Handmade On Peconic Bay on Facebook.

Little Creatures

The Handmade On Peconic Bay Summer 2010 selection of cyanotype prints, cards and rustic wood framed art is now available at Mascot Studio. Beach themed images include various crabs, shells, grasses and seabird feathers that my husband Matt and I find on the beach around Peconic Bay.

My personal fave is this cyanotype print that Matt created, based on an illustration of "Decapoda" by German biologist Ernst Haeckel, from his encyclopedic masterpiece, Kunstformen der Natur, 1899 - 1904. Some of these leggy little sea creatures look delish for a pastasciutta with seafood and pomodoro, but are probably more suitable as curiosities for your Wunderkammer decor obsessions!

You can now find Mascot Studio on Facebook, as well as 328 East 9th Street, New York City.

The Sea Will Tell

Nautical themes are my fave, when it comes to home decor. I like my place to feel beachy year round! I even married a sailor, although Matt's more of a photographer-artist these days. You can find his modern vintage nautical prints in our Handmade On Peconic Bay Supermarket and Etsy shops.

Matt Shapoff creates his one of a kind prints of sloops and lighthouses using a 19th century photographic process called the cyanotype. The nautical series is also an artistic collaboration with Second Life virtuoso RJ Kikuchiyo. Matt takes RJ's 3D digital images and makes special negatives for the cyanotype process, printing them outdoors in sunlight just as it was done over 100 years ago. Then Matt blind embosses the Handmade On Peconic Bay logo on each print, using his 1895 Pearl letterpress. Finally, both artists sit down to co-sign the work.

Handmade On Peconic Bay one of a kind Cyanotype nautical prints by Matt Shapoff, $38 each at Supermarket.

My, She Was Yar

"My, she was yar...It means, uh...easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, right. Everything a boat should be, until she develops dry rot."

- Katherine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story

Images courtesy of Daytrip Society, Handmade On Peconic Bay, Cynthia Rybakoff

White Christmas

One can't hope for a white Christmas in NYC these days. Maybe some holiday sleet or soggy gray ice. You can always count on copious amounts of rock salt to be sprinkled over the sidewalks if that happens, which is about as white as it gets. But, you can always create a festive holiday mood indoors. Some evergreen garlands and red berry branches in a vase make for a great low key forest recreation. Maybe some twinkle lights around the windows and a glass bowl of vintage ornaments on the table to complete your holiday theme.

Matt and I live/work in our conjoined "studios", and the apartment is just crammed with our stuff. There's not much room for elegant holiday tablescapes, so I prefer to watch them on TV. However, I'm currently collecting white ornaments, which work nicely with Matt's beloved white fiber optic techno-tree. I'm obsessed with white decor in general, and have amassed an eclectic array of ceramic and glass objets blancs, including a cute Jonathan Adler ceramic owl, some fabulous Tiffany art glass and a series of white terra cotta Japanese inspired table top pieces I designed for a restaurant in the 90's.

So when choosing the perfect frames for a new series of Matt's Cyanotypes, some of which would grace our walls, I struck white gold when I found a guy who had just scored some Wyoming snow fence. He claimed that brutal winds and raging snowstorms had weathered the wood in 10 years as much a barn that stood for 100 years in a gentler clime. Handmade on Peconic Bay is a green design studio, and the wood we use is reclaimed and upcycled by skilled artisans into our vintage inspired frames. The lick of white paint over the surface of the snow fence is new, allowing the wood to retain it's weather-beaten surface, and giving these frames a rustic wintery look.

Handmade On Peconic Bay whitewash framed Cyanotype prints by Matt Shapoff, $125 - $145 at Supermarket.

Harvest Home

My husband, Matt Shapoff loves to cook. He picked up the habit, a few years into our marriage, when I suggested he expand his cooking repertoire from deep fried potatoes into other food groups. I’m somewhat of an amateur chef myself, having sweated away a few thousand hours in professional kitchens as a low level chef de partie, including a mediocre Hamptons fish palace and a charmingly upscale Swedish bistro. I even spent a Summer season being abused by a grumpy chef at the old Amagansett Farmer’s Market, who disliked my dicing skills intensely but taught me how to make a wonderful cold ziti pasta salad marinated in roasted garlic oil and flecked with fresh dill.

Most nights Matt and I prefer to stay home and throw together tasty meals made with local seasonal ingredients readily available at NYC’s many farmers markets and specialty food shops. In late summer, and throughout the fall, we enjoy the bounty of the harvest, marveling at the sweetness of the corn and the abundance of good tomatoes after months of sensory deprivation. We also keep a good supply of fresh herbs on hand from Matt’s Southampton chef’s garden, which grows a little bigger each year. Herbs do better than vegetables in the sandy bay soil and salty air and we end up with copious amounts of parsley, basil, rosemary, sage, lavender and chives, most of which gets pressed and dried for Matt’s Cyanotype and Van Dyke Brown botanical prints.

This past summer, in between cooking experiments with Native American ingredients and the re-working of an old recipe for squash, corn and beans we named Pilgrim Stew in honor of the first Thanksgiving, Matt created a new Cyanotype series using only pressed herbs and edible flowers from his chef’s garden. We mounted the prints in one of a kind upcycled frames assembled from reclaimed wood paneling complete with original beadboard details and peeling paint. Choosing modern vintage frames made from weathered wood seemed a perfect compliment to the pale cyan botanicals, which give the appearance of being faded from the sun with age. A selection from Matt’s Chef’s Garden Series is now available at Mascot Studio in New York’s East Village.

Handmade On Peconic Bay Cyanotype Chef’s Garden Series by Matt Shapoff, on cream colored Rives paper in Antique White frames, $175-$250 at Mascot Studio.

Art Of Nature

“Numbskull” Cyanotype and Van Dyke prints by Matt Shapoff

Our home is a museum of not necessarily rare and precious objects. Just stuff we’ve stumbled upon and really liked for one reason or another. We’re not talking exotic wood carvings or colorful woven baskets from far away places, although I once dragged home from Stockholm a suitcase full of mid century modern Swedish ceramics and glassware. We collect things: a pair of vintage Boy Scout bookends, an incomplete set of worn wood type, a polychrome bird’s nest made of tangled sewing thread, a vintage microphone and whatnot.

Cyanotype fragment from Kunstformen der Natur, by Matt Shapoff

Natural wonders play an important role in our curatorial efforts and in Matt’s art. Each oddly shaped piece of driftwood, slice of agate or spiral seashell is examined for it’s unique potential to join our little cabinet of curiosities or perhaps become the subject of a new Handmade On Peconic Bay print series. Found feathers are of particular interest, as are dead bumblebees, lovely banded snail shells and tiny intact crabs in a ready stance, frozen in time on our shelf.

Van Dyke Brown fragment from Kunstformen der Natur, by Matt Shapoff

Call us new antiquarians living in a sepia toned world. We are modern collectors with Renaissance style. The 16th century Wunderkammer movement, defined as an explosion of interest in snapping up natural curiosities throughout Europe and Asia, then hoarding them in dedicated rooms and obsessively recording them in lavish botanical encyclopedias, was the original cult of collecting. Back then it was strictly wealthy patrons who traveled far and wide in search of animal and mineral specimens for their extensive curio cabinets. But the specimens were also of great interest to Northern European artists who started the trend for realistic still life paintings of newly discovered insects, vegetables and flowers. It’s an entirely human fascination with the art of nature that has not diminished in the last 500 years.

Handmade On Peconic Bay Wunderkammer collection of modern vintage Cyanotype and Van Dyke Brown prints by Matt Shapoff, $12.50 to $48.00 on Supermarket and Etsy.

Blue Is The New Green

Images from "Modern Vintage: Cyanotypes by Matt Shapoff"

In our brave new world of green living, Matt Shapoff is a natural. He’s been practicing eco-friendly photography for two decades, harnessing the sun's energy to expose biodegradable paper sensitized with non-silver based photochemistry, right in his own backyard. Even his subjects are organic: a visual Wunderkammer of the botanical and marine species of Peconic Bay, a tidal estuary between Long Island's North and South Forks. In 2007, Matt and his wife Cynthia Rybakoff started Handmade On Peconic Bay, a collection of Cyanotype paper goods and fine art prints in reclaimed vintage wood frames.

Peconic Bay, Southampton

Combining 19th century printmaking with 21st century digital photography, Matt spends his weekends at his Southampton, NY studio collecting “curiosities”: the wild flowers, herbs, shells, feathers and creatures that will become his distinctive Prussian blue Cyanotype images, printed en plein air just as it was done over 150 years ago. The natural subject matter and hand crafted technique imparts an overall vintage look and feel to his work, an aesthetic the New York Times has dubbed the New Antiquarians.

Cold Spring Pond, Southampton

On August 22nd, Matt will unveil his latest endeavors at his first solo show entitled "Modern Vintage: Cyanotypes by Matt Shapoff", hosted by Dr. Gerry Curatola at The Gallery at East Hampton Dental Associates. A portion of the proceeds will benefit the new Wellness Institute of Southampton Hospital. As the only hospital-based Integrative Medicine on Long Island’s East End, Southampton Hospital’s Wellness Institute brings together clinical excellence and a holistic approach to wellness.

You can find Handmade On Peconic Bay Cyanotype paper goods and prints at the Parrish Art Museum Shop, Southampton and Mascot Studio, NYC, as well as online at Supermarket.

Jewel Box Gallery

Announcing Handmade On Peconic Bay limited edition Cyanotye and Van Dyke Brown prints, by Matt Shapoff, at Mascot Studio, a jewel box of a gallery located in Manhattan's East Village. Proprietor and artist, Peter McCaffrey hand picks eye catching art and objects for his impeccably styled shop, with a decidedly cabinet of curiosities aesthetic, and will also whip up the perfect custom frame for your own artwork. An influential resource for fine art and decorative objects since 1982, Mascot studio is really the prototype for the kind of design made popoular today by West Elm and other mass market retailers.


Handmade On Peconic Bay Cyanotype and Van Dyke Brown prints $25-$145, at Mascot Studio 328 East 9th Street, NYC, 212-228-9090.

Down To Earth

It's Earth Week, a celebration of appreciation for our earth and of the environmental movement's successes thus far, as well as an excellent opportunity for discussion of environmental issues and solutions. Today marks the actual event, so I felt it was a wonderful opportunity to introduce my husband Matt Shapoff's collection of framed prints made from recycled wood in our new Handmade On Peconic Bay shop on Supermarket.

When I'm not making jewelry, I'm helping Matt with sales and marketing for his stunningly beautiful Cyanotype and Van Dyke Brown prints in our online shops at Etsy and now Supermarket.

"Numbskull" by Matthew Shapoff, single edition Cyanotype print in handmade frame of reclaimed Mahogany, $118 at Supermarket.