I'm lucky to have designer Lisa LaPorta, host of HGTV's "Designed to Sell," working with me to design and decorate a teen bonus room for my two daughters. The plan includes an art wall, which we all agree we want to reflect the girls, who are as different as city and country, but that's another matter.
At the mention of a wall featuring photos of them, I lift a nostril. LaPorta instantly knows what I mean. "They're tricky," she concedes. What she doesn't know is that family-photo walls stir up so many negative feelings in me that I probably should see a therapist.
First are the aesthetic problems. Not that a wall of family photos can't look great, but they almost always don't. The ones I've seen suffer from too many photos, many of which are faded and discolored, and hang crookedly with bad spacing in cheap, mismatched frames. On top of that, the family historians tend to keep adding photos as time marches on until they need to add another wing on the house.
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Chicago designer Bill Godley sums it up this way: "A collection of photos of people who have meant a lot to you in your lifetime is wonderful to have and use to make a decorative impact. But put these collections in good, coordinating frames and arrange them on long side tables or built-in shelves, not on the walls. Photo walls are very hard to do well and usually wind up looking dorky."
Dorky. That's precisely the word.
A second, deeper issue is that these family-photo walls just make me feel so inadequate as a mother. In reality, all that stands between me and having a dorky family-photo wall is the fact that my photos never get that far. To get my family's photos from the camera into a frame takes a series of steps I never accomplish. I'm so bad at this that my kids are certain we're in some witness-protection program.
Third is the pressure these walls put on people. Whenever I'm in someone's family shrine, I never know how long to linger. Not long enough seems rude; too long seems creepy. Does anyone know the protocol here?
So assorted framed photos of the girls were out. Displaying their collection of ribbons and trophies got a universal thumbs down from them for overall tackiness. Generic artwork got nixed for being too hotelish.
So what's left? We want personal but not cheesy; tasteful, not tacky; and in our budget but looking like it isn't. After some brainstorming, we determined that taking your photos (or impressions) to a new level can be a great way to stylishly inject yourself or your family into your wall art. Here are some ways to do that:
• Be abstract. Companies such as www.canvaspop.com will take your favorite photos and stylize them so they have a vintage, sepia-toned, cartoonlike, stippled or posterized effect; enlarge them; and mount the images onto stretched canvas. One idea LaPorta and I are considering is the same photo of the girls in four different treatments. The company also can divide one photo across three vertical rectangular canvases to form a triptych.
• Copy Warhol. Some companies will take your photo and reproduce it in a series of bold colors - yellow and turquoise, orange and fuchsia - turning your stills into pop art.
• Get an artist's impression. If you have a fabulous photo of a loved one, have a painter whose work you also love create a stylized painting from the snapshot. One of my editors has a lively oil painting of her black terrier, Lola, hanging in her home. Where a framed photo would be cute, a painting looks even better.
• Work images discretely into other works of art. A friend of mine who lives in a fabulous Tuscan-villa-style home has in her entryway a floor-to-ceiling textural painting that looks like a medieval tapestry. Look closer, and that's her daughter riding the unicorn, and her son wearing armor.
• Leave your mark. At www.dna11.com, a New York based company, you can have your DNA, fingerprints or lip prints digitized and turned into one-of-a-kind images fit for your living room. Go online to pick the size and colors you want for your impression, and order a kit for your samples. (The DNA sample is a cheek swab, and the lip print involves applying lipstick the company provides and kissing something.) If you're ever wanted, this makes it easier for the FBI.
Syndicated columnist Marni Jameson is the author of the just-released "House of Havoc," along with "The House Always Wins" (Da Capo Press). Contact her through www.marnijameson.com