grown-up chalkboard "art" - Improvised Life

Sometimes when I need a diversion from writing, I poke around location scout Andrea Raisfeld’s website of interesting spaces for rent for photography locations. You can browse by type (apartment, barn, log cabin…), or description (contemporary, Modernist, Swedish…), or even by a feature (bunk bed, river, treehouse), and so on. I always find unexpected ideas there, like the rectangle of unframed chalkboard on a wall at designer Pamela Hovland’s house in Connecticut.

Pamela made a pattern of chalk squiggles that is striking. She says some people have it mistaken for a Cy Twombly (an artist famous for chalkboard-like paintings and magnificent squiggles), although Pamela wasn’t thinking of his work when she made it. This is a grown-up chalkboard, made to define the space in an un-kid-like way. In addition to drawings and designs, there’s all sorts of things that would be good to write on chalkboard besides lists, like poems, quotes, dreams or “what if’s…”

The brilliant social thinker and visionary Rudolf Steiner made some astonishing – if inadvertent – chalkboard art when he illustrated his lectures…

(After many of his “thought drawings” had been erased, someone had the idea to give him coarse black paper to draw on so they could be preserved.)

It’s easy enough to make a chalkboard: a flat slab of something, like plywood or composites from the lumber yard or a stretched canvas (available at art supply stores)…painted with chalkboard paint (it comes in several shades of gray and colors!…yellow, orange, sour green…)…Or just paint a right on a wall…