Peter Max and Painting the foyer, stairwell, and upstairs hallway

So after living in this house for 3 years or so Collison and I FINALLY repainted our foyer, stairwell, and hallway.  When moving in it was already painted this shade of beige that just wasn't doing it for us. I know beige is a popular paint color for the home and if you can use it and make it look good in your space more power to ya. For us though, well, we just didn't get it! We lived with the color for these past few years, partly out of laziness, sure, but partly out of lack of inspiration towards the space in general. 

Here is that most impressive shade of beige I was telling you about...

Things finally came together though and we found inspiration in our Peter Max paintings to finally take the plunge and paint...

WITH PURPLE

 TWO DIFFERENT SHADES OF PURPLE!

We kicked around some ideas for the stairwell/hallway area (grey maybe? what do you think of peach?) and even tried some different paint samples. Nothing clicked though until we thought about what we would be hanging on the walls. 

A couple years ago Collison and I went on a cruise through the Caribbean on Norwegian Cruise Line and we acquired these Peter Max paintings/lithographs. There were tons of events planned on board the ship that passengers could attend while at sea but, one of the coolest events for me was the fine art auctions they had in their art gallery several times throughout the week. They would talk about the life of the artists that had work being auctioned off and share interesting information/stories about the individual pieces and the time in which they were created. Going to the art auctions was like attending fancy art history lectures with complimentary champagne so YEAH, I thought it was pretty cool!

After each event at the art gallery they would give everyone who bothered to stay for the whole thing some raffle tickets for a grand prize at the end of the week. We made it to every art gallery related event and I won't lie, a lot of that had to do with the complimentary champagne. What can I say? We LOVE champagne! 

When the grand prize drawing was held at the end of the week one of our tickets was drawn. We won a set trio of Peter Max acrylic paintings and color lithography on paper. It was quite exciting. After winning we had to pay to have them framed in special glass to protect them from fading and UV exposure. Not cheap at all by the way but sooo worth it and they are framed fantastically. 

Here are some close-ups of the art. This first one is from his Woodstock series and was used in the stage design for Woodstock 99'. Of course no Woodstock could ever live up to or replace the original Woodstock (so I've been told) but very cool none the less. 

Here it is reppin' the 60's at the end of the 90's. Sweet, huh?

The next one is his most famous and iconic piece called Love. Remember this is not the original painting we have here. We have a lithograph of it that he painted on and added to. They would not just give us the original for free in a raffle prize after all!

And the last one and largest of the three is called Year 2250 on Blends

We were inspired by all the color in these works and thought the pieces would really pop on our walls if they were purple. By the way, if you've never heard of Peter Max look him up sometime. He is a famous, still living, pop artist and laid back, cool dude in general. 

Here is our upstairs hallway before we painted. Yup, it was a pigsty. So happy to share that with the world! yay! haha.

And here it is after painting. If you look closely you can see the wall displaying the Peter Max paintings is  painted a brighter shade of purple than the rest of the walls.  We went with a purplish/grey shade called Silver Frost by Pittsburgh Paints for the rest of the walls.

And yeah, that is a Sistine Chapel size portion of The Creation of Adam hanging above our stairs. lol. I wasn't crazy about it when we first got it but now it is one of my favorites among all our hand me downs! I'd love to see the painting in person some day. 

Anyway, that is what I was up to last week! I was so happy to take pictures so I could share them here and show you all what our stairwell is about now. lol

Til' next time folks :)