Collecting, Curating, and Cobras

An homage to my antiquing roots and, by proxy, my mama

Before all that, a few things big & small…

The 411 on the last few months in no particular order: 

• My first illustrated book, Guitar (written by Lori Haskins Houran), was released in April. Drawing hands playing the guitar was a punishment challenge, so I’ve officially been hazed into children’s publishing - huzzah! I paid tribute to one of my fave Disney characters in it - skumps, SKUMPS, SKUUUUUUMPS!

  

• Medieval cheering aside, The Ultimate Summer Reading Challenge for Kids that I illustrated was also released. This was super fun to work on, and tiny me would’ve loved it. You read a book and get a prize. There’s a holographic ruler with woodland creatures, name plates for books, stickers, worms on skateboards…okay, almost 40-year-old me loves it too.

• My mom visited me in SLC, and we went to every boutique in Salt Lake despite the blistering wind and snow. Jan is now in a long-distance relationship with Steve, my Russian Blue cat. They spent the week ogling each other and making biscuits together while I 3rd-wheeled it on the couch. 

  

  He’s heartbroken she’s about to leave.

• After querying my dream literary agents, I scored one of my top two picks! I’m so honored and thrilled and hopeful for what’s to come. I signed with Jennifer March Soloway at Andrea Brown Literary Agency, and she’s a total badass - more on that soon!

And for now:

• I’m making portfolio pieces while I wait for my next book to start. I make a lot of high-contrast art on dark backgrounds, so I’m challenging myself with some lush day scenes. And after drawing people playing the guitar in my first book and orchestras, opera houses, and 13 costumed characters singing in my second book, I’m sooo down to draw some leaves.

• I’m claiming a new animal mascot. I think I’m gonna make it a weasel. So sorry, no one else can draw weasels. Mine!

• I’m learning to paint traditionally and play with mixed media. I had a breakthrough recently: I don’t like textured paper! I invested in some Arches hot press for a workshop, and now I’m ruined. The branding is gorgeous and pink and looks divine propped up for decor. And speaking of…

Collecting + Curating

I love decorating with unconventional objects. I'm drawn to primitive and general store antiques, folksy/boutiquey finds a la John Derian, and natural history-type stuff. People often hear antiques and think I like fine, esteemed items of the past. Not really. I like weird shit with soul. Roadside barn and estate sales, not Christie's. Folk art, not finery.

I inherited the compulsion to collect & display from my mom—the 'junk gene' as the chatty roadside hawkers call it. Our house was unique, practically an exotic experience compared to the homogenous interiors of most houses in our tiny rural town. Pop open a front door in Floresville, Texas, and you’re guaranteed to find a gallery wall of silver crosses, mounted deer heads, and a moral lecture via Hobby Lobby signs. My home felt like a boutique stocked with vignettes and little stories everywhere. A Victorian postcard tucked into a bird's nest. Clove-dotted oranges suspended from the ceiling at Christmas. Great grandma's leather purse displayed on the wall with a glove & a brooch hanging out. Why not? 

I started going to the Wimberley Market Days with my mom when I was tiny. It was a maze of folk art and endless antique booths full of old bottles, buttons, and rust you didn't casually see in everyday life. I was hooked - enraptured with these abandoned artifacts for sale. Everything felt like a secret, just waiting to be revived and appreciated, and I was the one for the job. When I reached middle school and started exploring my identity through redecorating my room, "time capsule" was always the vibe I went for. I meticulously arranged and re-arranged 1920s-era bottles next to framed clippings of ads from 1950s magazines.

And thus began my love affair with collecting and curating snippets of history. I don't pine for the past, I love air conditioning and the internet, but I've always been fascinated with how life used to be. Life before phones, weather forecasts, and anesthesia. Life with polio, chamber pots, and corsets. I rarely know the history of the objects I acquire, but I always wonder - especially about the poison bottle I bought in Buenos Aires.

My childhood home was also decorated with found objects, another tick I inherited. I grew up on a farm with cows, so there was always a supply of skulls, feathers, and crispy insects to collect. Sphinx moths look lovely in a jam jar, and the horned beetle (prize find, Jan!) lives on (sorta) in a little octagonal trinket jar. My in-home natural history collection has also yielded some fun convos:

Last year, I unwrapped a dead baby scorpion, a tiny frog carcass, and a cicada for Christmas. "You knew I would love these!" I giddily exclaimed as I hugged my mom.

"Is this yours?" texted our contractor with a photo of a dead grasshopper on the porch. "It is now!" I shoot back.

Empty snail shells are pocketed whether they make the domestic cut or not. The little pouch on my jogging shorts has seen chestnuts, dead bumble bees, and a host of leaves and twigs. Just before they (thankfully) moved, our self-aggrandizing neighbors tossed their dried allium clippings into the compost bin, and I ran out to collect some and bid them farewell. "Those people are fucking weird," I later mumbled to my husband, stuffing their trash into a jar to display in my kitchen. 

My husband, Ryan, did not grow up in a family of collectors. He's raised a few flags on the play, but for the most part, he's open to living in a house with what some consider year-round Halloween decorations. Sure, I probably shouldn't keep a 75 year old bottle of boric acid next to the salt, but we haven't had any mixups. Just a little homage to life before Clorox cleaning wipes. 

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Here are a few things I've recently acquired:

1. A secret society banner. I don’t know much about this one, but I have a super rad book to research it. These are usually pretty pricy, but I got an excellent deal on this because the paper on the casket illustration is torn.

   

2. Antique frame bulletin board. Jan helped me make this, and it’s my latest fave thing. It’s my analog Pinterest board.

A few of the things on it:

• Receipt from Nest in San Francisco. I could’ve gone broke in this store, but I settled for a Nathalie Lete cat pillow. I chatted with the owner a bit, and then she handed me a bonus gift: the receipt. It was the inspiration behind my Folktale Week announcement last year. 

• Overlapping the trumpeting swans, a Cipe Pineles piece. She was an incredible graphic designer in the 1930s that’s definitely worth a google.

• A memento from my friend Deb Stein’s Storycamp Disco workshop on the bottom right. I respond oh-so-well to her brilliant writing and art-making prompts, and this was no exception. I won’t share what she asked us to do, but it gave me some sweet relief from overthinking and deeming materials too precious. I guess I’m gonna make gushing about Deb part of every post now!

   

  3. And finally, a Little Golden book I’d never seen before! I scored this little beauty at an antique fair I went to in Ogden a few weeks ago.

Original Little Goldens? Yes, please. Shopping with Peter & Penny? Throw me in that Yankee Clipper, bitch! Historic shopfronts? I’m DYING! And then I open it up and audibly gasp because:

A coin purse butcher shop! The saccharine sweet pink, the stripey-come-on-in awning, the casual carcasses dangling in the window - it’s so perfectly morbid!

And the interior! I’d DIE to do a book with historic shopfronts and do cartwheels in my casket to do a butcher scene. Unfortunately, the contemporary market is a bit dry for knives and meat in picture books. I did get to draw a heroine wielding a knife in my second book, so there is hope.

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And lastly. The objet d'art that eludes me. Maybe if I broadcast it, I’ll cross paths with the right one…

Some people want Louis Vuitton and Coco Chanel logos draped in their closets. A hot tub adjacent to the heated lap pool. A 10’ HDTV with 5,000 channels. I want an antique cobra taxidermy. Under a cloche.

I first saw one on Jon Contino’s Instagram in 2017, and it’s been a low-key obsession since. It’s so menacing and bizarre, and I know exactly where I would put it.

BEHOLD!

I’ve encountered a few snakes in antique shops and even some cobras, but they’re never quite right. Usually, they’re rattlesnakes coiled in goofy, rustic grass dioramas. Others are just poorly executed, amateurish. Many are white, and I need a brown or black one - like Nagaina in Rikki Tikki Tavi. I also need the fangs out. If you’re going to decorate your home with cobras, you go big. No tepid, timid reptiles loafing about our abode.

I’ve seen snakes twisted into candlesticks—lovely for a dining room—and countless specimens in liquid-filled jars: Two-headed snakes, snakes in jaunty stripes, and plenty of harmless little fellas floating in that gelatinous liquid. There are mounted snake skins galore, hat bands, cowboy boots, of course…stilettos for the intrepid.

Perhaps most curious, I’ve seen a cobra stretched out and fashioned into a walking cane. It was brown with red eyes, fangs out, coiled upright. The perfect, villainous accessory to saunter about town, searching for oddities.

If only I were that weird…