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

Meet The Designer

There's a brand new feature on IndieShop.com worth taking note of! Did you ever wonder about how independent designers got their start, get their inspiration, or how they make their unique products? Now you can get an intimate glimpse into the mind of the artisan, with "Meet The Designer" video clips, located on the product pages of each designer's store on IndieShop.com.

Here I am, above, discussing how I got my start as a jewelry designer, and my first big break, before becoming a corporate jewelry designer for brands such as Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger, and what inspires me now that I've decided to be an "indie" designer once again.

Here's my husband Matt Shapoff, whose Handmade On Peconic Bay collection of modern vintage photographic prints is also available on IndieShop, revealing the secrets of how he creates his cyanotypes prints, totes and scarves, plus the mysterious significance of the year 1895!

Videos courtesy of IndieShop.com.

Boo!

Meet Numbskull Van Dyke Brown No. 256, a modern vintage photographic print by Matt Shapoff for Handmade On Peconic Bay. A proponent of sustainable design, Matt uses solar radiation to expose his Van Dyke brown prints outdoors, while the sun is shining. Combining a 19th century photographic printing process with 21st century digital design, each print is a unique exposure, with a brush mark signature of the photochemistry applied to 100% cotton rag fine art paper.

Numbskull is a perfectly creepy yet memorable hostess gift for that Halloween bash you're attending. He's also ready for framing in something dusty, dark and old, for that year round Gothic touch!

Image courtesy of Supermarket.

Daisy, Daisy

Goodbye summer, hello fall! Well, not officially until Wednesday, September 22nd at 11:09am, so let's call it early fall. It's also my favorite time of year on Peconic Bay, which is located on the south fork of Long Island. The weather is bright and crisp, and farm stands explode with Technicolor produce. It always feels like a new beginning and a fresh start to the year, rather than the end of summer freedom. In the Jewish culture, one actually does celebrate the New Year in early fall, with Rosh Hashanah.

Once the summer flowers have faded, autumn is the time Montauk daisies kick into gear, having spent the past two seasons quietly spreading dark green bushy leaves. Unlike the common Shasta daisy, which blooms in spring and summer, the Montauk daisy, also known as the Nippon daisy, with origins in Japan, only blooms in fall. Aesthetically, I prefer the Montauk daisy's shorter, bushier profile in the garden, with multiple blooms per stem. As an added bonus, butterflies love them, while the ravenous deer and bunnies ignore them!

Handmade On Peconic Bay Van Dyke Brown Montauk Daisy 5" square print with gift envelope, $20.00, at Hester Street Fair, A Little Of What You Fancy, 19 Newtown Lane East Hampton, 631.324.3113.

Montauk Daisy garden image courtesy of Garden Blog.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Blue Is Universal

Matt and I just launched our new mini-collection of Handmade On Peconic Bay Holiday art print cards, which was challenging because we don’t love the crass commercialization of the holiday season. Today is Black Friday, the late Autumn festival of competitive discount shopping, in case you missed the Christmas-crazed housewife in the Target television ads during your Thanksgiving reruns. And yet the Winter Solstice is inevitable in the northern hemisphere, so we participate in our own possibly pagan way.

For instance, when designing our holiday greeting cards, lengths were taken to avoid referencing candy canes and Christmas trees, and certain colors were immediately eliminated, including stocking red and forest green. Instead, we created a palette of subtle organic colors with names like Ocean, Earth, Marine, Grass, and Soil. In order to avoid images that seemed too kitsch, we axed the Christmas wreaths, angels, reindeer and Santa Claus caps in favor of botanicals, bird’s nests and dancing snowflakes (well, the snowflakes are kind of kitsch, but in a cool way). Then, in a perhaps misguided attempt to fit in and not completely alienate the folks who prefer that nostalgic holiday feeling, some traditional festive slogans were added in a vintage font.

One thing I think we can all agree on is that blue is perhaps a more universal color to represent the myriad of multicultural Winter festivals that take place this time of year. We happen to celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas, so a few years ago Matt brought home a snow white fiber optic techno-tree with filament branches that twinkle with the cool blue glow of pre-programmed energy saving LED's. We’ll decorate it with a variety of white abstract ornaments and have ourselves a merry little Festivus.

Handmade On Peconic Bay Holiday Cards, $18.00 for a set of 8 cards with coordinating envelopes, are available online at Supermarket and Etsy, and Mascot Studio in NYC.

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.

Do You Upcycle?

If you haven't been living under a rock, you are probably making an effort to recycle, which will reduce your waste into lesser quality, but highly usable component materials and maybe even save the environment! It's also known as downcycling. As a designer, I tend to think a lot about the upcycle as well, that is to create great looking new products from used stuff. To upcycle is to take salvaged parts and create a new object of greater value. It's nothing new, but using reclaimed or vintage components inbues designs with the spirit of their unique history. Not only is mixing things up more interesting aesthetically, it's also good for us. With our fragile biosphere increasingly in peril, supporting artisans who make upcycled goods is a socially conscious way to share our global commitment to good planetary housekeeping.

"Whoops-A-Daisy" by Matt Shapoff for Handmade On Peconic Bay, one-of-a-kind Cyanotype print in upcycled barnwood frame, $68 at Supermarket.

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.

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.

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.

Love Notes

It seems that pink is having another Spring moment, as it does every few years or so in the not so unrelated worlds of fashion and design. For Valentine's day, I've created a botanical photo illustration in geranium pink on smooth bright white stock and paired it with a grey textured envelope.

Love Notes, a blank note card, is part of our Handmade On Peconic Bay paper collection I design and produce with my husband Matt Shapoff, who is a photographer and printmaker. Our flagship store is a humble Etsy shop, where we sell my art print cards and Matt's Cyanotype prints and cards.

Handmade On Peconic Bay paper goods are also sold at The Parrish Art Musuem gift shop, and will be available on Supermarket in the near future. Be sure to check out Matt's stunning "Peconic Curiosities" series on CynthiaRybakoff.com, which is currently available wholesale only. If you have a shop and are interested in picking up the collection, contact me via Etsy or my website.

Handmade On Peconic Bay "Love Notes" Valentine's card, $3.50 on etsy.com.