HOME DECORATING
26 September 2008
“Starry, Starry Night”
I’ve said it so many times I’m likely to no longer be believed, but even so… it is so. You can find the damnedest things on the Internet. I knew that before I started writing these blogs, of course, but now I know it ever so much more so—to quote from a favorite kids’ book I read while I was growing up. (Tales of Homer Price, actually, and you can check it out… on the Internet!) But I digress.
I really sat down to write about a person who makes ceilings that cannot be believed and which, frankly, I did not think I was going to write about, because he’s an artist who paints ceilings, and how is a ceiling going to get from his base in Southern California to, well, wherever it is that you live. Well, OK, he wouldn’t actually paint the ceiling in his studio at home and then take it to the site, but the natural expectation is that he would, for obvious reasons, be confined to his local area. Well, as it turns out, he is willing to travel wherever he can find an opportunity to create art, and that, in turn, makes him someone worth telling people about.
Spending time on Rip Read’s website is a perfectly mesmerizing way to while away ha
lf an hour or more. And anyone who decides to commission one of his Star Murals is in for a treat. I was born and raised in Montana during a time when kids used to tell their parents, “We’re hiking to the lake, see you tomorrow,” and everyone was fine with that, an item I bring up because lying in a sleeping bag (we never did get a tent) and looking up at the stars at night is one of the most awesome things anyone can do. Trust me, if you live in a big city, you have never seen the night sky because of earth shine. But for those who haven’t—and would like to—without the added effort of actually going to the woods and sleeping under the stars, well, there is now an artist who specializes in pai
nting Star Murals that, just like the real stars, only come out at night. He can even go so far as painting a sky of clouds and blue which turns to stars at night. He will also paint comets, or if a nebula seems like just the thing, he can provide any number of these, and all of them are stunning.
It’s a ceiling that could be used for a kid’s room or for an adult’s, as it has any number of applications, from an exotic ceiling over a spa to, well, just about anything a body might want. He claims to paint in five dimensions: width, height, depth, glow and movement. Mr. Read has developed a method of painting that enables him to invest his Star Murals with a shimmering movement, to give them the appearance of twinkling. So, I guess now we can rewrite the children’s nursery rhyme to read, “twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder how in the hell he did that!”
Joseph
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