Three pots of inspiration, three times.

Three visual pools I want to swim in, three vintage clothing sellers, and three bits of ephemera from my week.

The mind of a visual thinker (hi!) is PACKED with photographs, colors, textures, and various oddities—both real and imagined. While Absolument is always a snapshot of what’s swirling around in my head, I want this writing to hyper-reflect what’s going on up there right now. If you’re reading this in your email app, it may be truncated. You can click through to see it more properly in a browser, or in the Substack app if you have it.

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Three people whose visual pool I want to swim in:

When I wrote about Gio Ponti a few months ago, I described his oeuvre as being a soup that I wanted to be dipped into. Let’s go along with that feeling, but expand it a little more into a pool, because a bowl doesn’t feel like an adequately-sized vessel anymore.

1. Montse Tanús, who I am Instagram friends with, works in art direction and design for British Vogue and has a fabulously rich visual life. We both spend a good amount of time in the Basque Country and I’m hoping one day our paths will cross. Maybe this should be one of my big goals for 2024!

   

   

   

2. Artist Emily Ferguson, which I was introduced to thanks to this oil painting she created:

   

   I want both the painting and the ensemble, don’t you? Her exhibition If You Want, I’ll Be Your Star is up at HALF GALLERY in Los Angeles now until February 17th. The more I admire these phtographs, the more I want to get back into learning the art of oil painting. I had so much the feeling of creative ignition while exploring the medium and learning how to mix colors.

   

   

   

3. Helle Høgsbro Krag because I am mentally in my Copenhagen era and also because I find her interior and fashion styles to be unique as heck. She has so much femininity, grace, and a vision that I find unparalleled. Even her daughter, Betty, inherited this way of being. I love following them both on Instagram—their lives look charged with delight.

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Three pieces of ephemera I’ve been captivated by this week:

1. The storage facilities at The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, because I’m an archivist and object dork and also can emphasize with the sensitivity of historically looted artifacts. (I’m not accusing The Smithsonian of doing so, but museum collections are often culturally tricky.)

   

2. Sir John Soane’s drawing office as shown in The World of Interiors in May of 2023, photographed by @erdemlondon, and brought to my attention by

   Sophia Leopold
   via Instagram.

   

3. Louise Bourgeois’s Plate 3 of 11, from her illustrated book, He Disappeared into Complete Silence. This second edition from 2005 is in the MoMA Collection.

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Three vintage clothing sellers who occupy my daydreams:

1. I’ll be permanently lusting over the collection of my native Arizona, Desert Vintage, which now has a second shop in New York City.

2. Resee has been a visual channel that I’ve been opening up every time I want to envision myself in something French—though they also have a massive collection of non-French designers. I bought a beloved vintage 1970s Jean Varon dress from Resee after spending months thinking about how I would become my *ideal self* while wearing it. It fit all of my dreams and more (but sadly not my thigh region, so it needed some tailoring). Suddenly I transformed into a disco-era French mermaid. J'adore ce sentiment!

   

   

   

   

3. If you look up “ethereal pretty” in the dictionary, you’ll find the synonym: Devore Vintage. I have the strong urge to put my face on all of their silky textiles.

I included this 1930s silk dress in my vintage wedding dress post.

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xx

Trois times a charm, as they say.

Kelsey