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

Death In Venice {In Style}

Some inspiration for all you little fashion creatures of the night, skull jewelry by the venerable luxury Venetian jewelry house, Codognato! Famously known for their intricately rendered vanitas themed jewels, skulls have become the trademark motif of the house. The subject of vanitas or "vanities" was popularized by 16th century Dutch painters, who meant the skulls to represent the vanity of living.

A cautionary tale for the viewer about the transient nature of wealth and pleasures of the flesh, the skull and and other symbolic objects, such as snuffed out candles, dead flowers and rotting fruit, were meant to remind us of the certainty of death.

Images courtesy of Elle, Quintessentially, NotesPrecieuses, Paula Stenberg.

Suite Seduction

Bask in the staid luxury of these oil paintings by artist Page Laughlin, whose lovely interiors are not quite what they seem. Veiled in seduction, the contents of her paintings most reveal one's innermost desires for glamour, and the sheer excess of rooms resplendent with expensive taste.

For years, Ms. Laughlin has been studying the fantasies presented to readers of high-end shelter magazines, such as Architectual Digest. Basing her paintings on photographs of stately interiors from these commercial publications, she presents the viewer with a dappled brush stroke fantasy of materialist beauty.

Images courtesy of Page Laughlin.

Sigmund And The Sea Monsters

My husband Matt and I are beach babies, and love to collect pretty shells, but also scary things that wash up on the shores of Peconic Bay. The most fierce creature by far is the horseshoe crab (if ever their was a reason to wear aqua socks!). But nothing we've ever found compares to fascinating prehistoric sea creatures, like ammonites, in both beauty and potential ick factor. Ammonites are related to squid, and their golden spiral shells were once home to creepy-crawly multi-limbed marine animals.

Matt's Van Dyke Brown print for Handmade On Peconic Bay, featured in the current issue of Hamptons Magazine, depicts a variety of ammonite forms, from Ernst Haeckel's 1904 Kunstformen der Natur. Framed in upcycled vintage wood molding, with the original paint, it's a pleasant reminder of a time when sea monsters ruled the planet.

Handmade On Peconic Bay "Art Of Nature" one of a kind Van Dyke Brown framed print, $225.00 at A Little Of What You Fancy, East Hampton, 631.324.3113.

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.

Curiosity Shop

Summer is in full swing at Mascot Studio. An amazing resource for modern vintage objet d'art, proprietor Peter McCaffrey has curated a wonderful little collection of paintings, drawings and prints for summer. Cyanotypes by Matt Shapoff for Handmade On Peconic Bay, mixed media paintings by Paul Moreno, limited edition giclee prints by Chris Buzelli, and some terrific watercolors of birds on found vintage coin collector's notes, by Peter himself, are currently showing and selling fast.

Be sure to "Like" Mascot Studio's Facebook page and see works by all the artists mentioned in this post!

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.

For The Birds

"My love for birds pushed me to create art which shows their beauty and importance." - Olivia Bouler.

An aspiring Ornithologist and artist, 11 year old Olivia wept when she heard about the oil spill in the Gulf Coast. So she contacted the Audubon Society with an idea to help raise money for the cause. So far she's raised over $110,000! Read a charming interview with this amazing young artist and activist, and how she's raised the money (CNN). Olivia might just be my favorite new artist!

Images courtesy of AOL artists.

Top Shelf Goods

Do take 10 minutes out of your busy day to watch this charming and rather wacky short film entitled "Damaged Goods", by London ceramic artist Barnaby Barford. It's tragic tale of  low born boy meets upper class girl played out by porcelain figurines in a  cluttered bric-a-brac shop. 

The film explores forbidden love between the different strata of society, their world portrayed here quite literally as a hierarchy of shelving, with the messy floor of the shop representing the lower class origins of the boy, to the top shelf lifestyle of the privileged class girl amongst the crystal and silver.

It's also a classic rags to riches story with shattering consequences! I love the mix of characters  and the choice of animating classic porcelain figurines - they remind me of my mother's Royal Doultan collection I played with as a child.

Images courtesy of designboom.

Art Imitates Virtual Life

Check out this super profile of my husband Matt Shapoff, Posted to Main News, the Second Life newspaper. Not familiar with Second Life? Where have you been? Second Life has been around since 2003, but it made a big splash in pop culture back in 2007, in an episode of The Office, entitled Local Ad, which introduced Dwight Schrute's "Second Second Life" avatar. Hilarity ensued.

Matt's a real life artist and photographer, whose unique collection of one of a kind Cyanotype and Van Dyke Brown art prints, called Handmade On Peconic Bay, have been steadily gaining popularity online as virtual art since 2007. That's his art in a Second Life gallery pictured above.

The flesh and blood Matt is transformed in Second Life into his alter ego, a tiny panda avatar called Kat2Kit. In fact, Kat2Kit is not only an artist but also a talented virtual actor who stars in Pooky Amsterdam's popular Second Life game show called The 1st Question. You can catch his live antics every Tuesday night at 10pm on treet.tv!

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.

Whoops-A-Daisy!

Matt and I were thrilled to find my tablescape featured on Apartment Therapy! Pictured are objects from our own apartment I styled for this shoot: vintage Steelmaster file drawers with (from left to right) Gunnar Nylund for Rörstrand ceramic bowls, Tiffany white art glass vase, Jonathan Adler ceramic owl and West Elm ceramic vase with some great pheasant feathers. Above it all, Whoops-A-Daisy Cyanotype print by Matt Shapoff for Handmade On Peconic Bay at Supermarket.