If you’ve been following me on instagram (and if you’re not, you should! Click here) you’ll have noticed the appearance of Fornasetti’s girl on my feed recently.
Who is Pietro Fornasetti? He’s an italian artist who created more than 11,000 items, many featuring the face of a woman, operatic soprano Lina Cavalieri, as a motif. Fornasetti found her face in a 19th-century magazine and decide to create endless variations of her face, kinda cool?! The “Tema e Variazioni” (theme and variation) plate series based on Cavalieri’s face numbered more than 350, and I decided to use a handful of them for the gallery wall.
I’ve wanted to work something like this into our home decor for a while now, and the mood finally struck me! Our stairwell up to the second floor has really high ceilings (humble brag) which makes them hard to style without a 10 foot ladder and a giant canvas.
The front door to the second flight of stairs is home to our family tree gallery wall, but the second flight up to the second floor was empty. I had been holding-out for a great piece to hang, but so far nothing has surfaced. The great thing about a gallery wall is that it can reconfigured and taken down/put back up in almost any space, so choosing to do a Fornasetti gallery wall was a no-brainer for me.
I opted to stick with the black and white that we’ve got going on the second floor landing. We have a cluster or circular mirrors, and our wedding vows are on the wall in black frames, so the black and white faces were perfect for the project.
When choosing to do your own gallery wall (regardless of the content) remember that it’s nice to have a cohesive pattern among the frames: are they all hung vertically? horizontal? on a repeating pattern? What’s the guiding direction? All good things to consider.
In my case, this voice helped me pick the faces I wanted on our wall. Because I have somehow amassed a rather substantive set of black 8×10 frames with a white mat from Dollarama, I opted to use them in a repeating horizontal and vertical step pattern up the wall.
So far I’m quite happy with the wall. I have one black frame left, so I may chose to place it somewhere complimentary on the landing. We shall see!
Would you consider a gallery wall like this?
