What is a girl to do???

Matt and I have very contemporary taste. We decorate our home in a minimalist fashion and the artwork we are drawn to is modern and often abstract. When we built our home we made our kitchen very monochromatic and modern. We added a splash of color with the bright red pendent lamps we hung above our bar area. It was always our intention to hang a really modern piece of artwork in the kitchen that pulled the red into our color scheme.

Well, finding that artwork ended up being a major problem - a major problem. Part of the problem was that I knew exactly what I wanted. I could see it in my head, I could explain it to anyone, but I couldn't find it in stores.

We looked everywhere. We scoured the Internet, looked at art chain stores, and even contacted a professional artist about creating a piece for the kitchen. We found stuff that would have worked, but in all we were going to spend hundreds of dollars on artwork that we just didn't love.

Pure craziness.

So....what is a girl to do when she knows what she wants, but can't find it in stores? I'll tell you what a girl does - she goes to desperate measures and just does it herself!!! Yes, you read that right. I decided to paint it myself. If any of you know me you know that I am not an artist, but the cool thing about abstract art is that simple is key. If you can make a circle you can make an abstract picture. And, in a nutshell, that is just what I did. The background was kind of tricky for someone as inexperienced as me. I wanted it to look like a wash of black and grey (kind of like a freshly erased blackboard). After I figured that out I just created numerous circles over it in various sizes and colors.

In all Matt and I are really happy with it. It pulls the colors in, is abstract, and is exactly what I saw in my mind all of those months we were hitting dead ends everywhere else. The other positive to this is that it cost us a fraction of what we were going to spend on artwork we didn't truly love. I love a happy ending.