The painting was a student work done in the style of Picasso’s 1904 “Woman with a Helmet of Hair” (original pictured below). The student’s attempt was slightly sharper angled and saturated in much brighter blues than the original.

Still great. Just different. And also, like 1/1,000,000^th the price of the original.

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The guy who came in to purchase the painting said his wife sent him specifically to get it. They had visited my shop over the weekend, when she had a visceral reaction to seeing the portrait of this woman in blue; she audibly gasped.

When I found her (the painting) at an antique mall, I also gasped. The blue on the canvas was blinding and the hair on this woman was so interestingly piled high on her head. So striking.

I had to have her.

She wasn’t exactly my style, but I knew someone would find her attractive.

My job as a vintage dealer is to find interesting pieces, and I’ve honed my eye to find “the good stuff” over the past two decades – but what exactly is the good stuff?

When it comes to art, that’s anyone’s guess. Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.

Obviously, there are examples of well-known artists throughout history whose work fetches millions of dollars at auction – Picasso, Warhol, Monet -- the list goes on. But I think it’s actually much simpler than that.

I mean, I can’t afford that sh*t anyways, but I can keep my eyes open for pieces that make me *feel* something. That’s my ONLY requirement.

How does this piece make me feel?

Not, “Does this complement my room/home/interiors?”

I’m not a trained artist. I went to school for fashion and journalism. I can’t tell you the difference between acrylic and oil paint. But I do know about color, texture, space, composition, and perhaps most importantly, gut feelings. Everyone has gut feelings – which is how I know you are capable of developing your own art language and interests; no experience required.

When I’m looking for pieces for my shop, often they align with my own taste, but sometimes I go out on a limb and purchase pieces that I don’t personally find attractive but know in my gut are good and different; and they eventually find their equally appreciative counterpart.

Over the past decade, there has been a movement in interior design that has lent towards a prescriptive sameness; tones in beige and shades of green. Earthy elements that feel calm, safe and perfectly pretty – but lacking.

Repeatable design formulas that elevate spaces from college Ikea apartments to neutral-tone starter homes have made interior design accessible to the masses. If that’s what you’ve got right now, that’s okay. It just means there’s an opportunity to test the waters and step out on a limb whether you have the developed “eye” or not.

Let’s start with art.

Don’t match your couch.

Make your friends ask “why?”

No one needs to “get it.”

It’s perfectly acceptable to just say, “I don’t know why, but I just had to have it!”

As a dealer I don’t always know where my pieces end up, but I’m confident the “lady in blue” -- that the customer just had to have -- is going to be a conversation starter in her new home and that’s the very best-case scenario I could hope for.

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I had a few good friends when I was young, but each of those relationships fizzled for one reason or another. My closest friend from childhood ended up with an eating disorder in high school. She kept hiding her lunch in my car when I’d drive us to school. She was struggling and the only thing I could think of doing was calling her mom; which I did. That was the end of our friendship; it was my first big breakup.

College brought me a fresh pool of prospects. Sophomore year I met a friend who eventually became my roommate. We were two peas in a pod. Post-college, we were bridesmaids at each other’s weddings and kept in touch while living in different states; hours-long phone calls would sustain us a few times per year -- the type of catch ups where you could fully recap months of life in one fell swoop.

We both had kids and would visit each other at least once a year. It felt like the kind of friendship that could last forever even though we rarely saw each other. She brought her entire family to Maryland to celebrate my son’s 2^nd birthday, November 2019 -- and we all know what happened in 2020.

She was the closest thing I had to a best friend. I thought she was my ride or die. But then the pandemic happened and somehow our friendship just faded away.

It was so quiet and so slow.

No conversation. No real reason why.

It devastated me.

For years I’ve questioned, “What did I do wrong? Does she hate me? Why won’t she answer my texts – or emails – or phone calls?” I felt like a desperate ex-girlfriend, which I suppose I was.

This fall, it will have been about 7 years since I last saw her in person. I still think about her. She got remarried, had another kid and changed careers. I only know this because of social media though; not because she told me.

The pandemic put a lot of relationships under the microscope. The strain it put on all of us, collectively, cannot be minimized or ignored. But for me, the hardest part was the isolation and the quiet quitting of friendships.

I know I’m not alone.

It never feels good to lose a friend but perhaps feels even worse when there is no “smoking gun” that you can point to and say, “this is why it ended.”

The silver lining of exiting my 30s, post-pandemic, almost friendless, has been that I literally have zero f*cks to give. The grief of that decade has ushered me into my 40s with a new outlook and no time to waste.

The friends I’m surrounded by now have all entered my life in the last 3 years. These are women in adjacent life circumstances (caring for young children) and similar creative careers (designers, shop owners). In some cases, we bonded over one small detail when meeting for the first time and simply dove headfirst into friendship. More than once it’s felt like that scene from the movie Step Brothers where Will Ferrell says to John C. Reilly, “Did we just become best friends?!”

With these post-40 friends, we go deep; quickly – the conversations leave nothing on the table.

These are sentiments I would have been scared to admit in my 30s but now, feel liberating.

There’s more empathy and less time to dance around hard subjects. There’s more honest feedback and less fluffy “you’ve got this” language. We make time for each other now in ways that would have felt impossible in our 30s during those early stages of motherhood and career building.

I don’t know if it’s strictly hormonal (hello perimenopause) or the collective stress of being a Millennial woman, but these friendships of my fellow 40-somethings have been life-giving.

One thing I’d say to my childhood self who was sold a tidy picture of friendship, is that you never know who, when, or why, someone comes into or falls out of your life. The ones who are in your life right now may or may not be here for the long haul – and that’s okay. Dive into what’s in front of you. You can both appreciate and lean into the people in your life right now and feel grief for the ones who aren’t anymore.

For the friends who feel like, “the one who got away” it’s okay to leave the door cracked open for them. You never know when they might reappear. I hope my friend comes back when we’re 50 and we catch up on two decades of life over the course of two hours on the phone. That’s where having empathy and not giving a sh*t collide.

In the height of the tiny home + minimalism era of the early-mid 2000s, my husband and I drank the Kool-Aid; we were chasing a simpler, less consumer driven life. We were sold the idea that less is more; that you can make life work with only the absolute bare necessities. We became hellbent on buying land and building a tiny house and living with 2 forks, 2 spoons, and 2 knives.

So, we tried-ish. And then we failed.

In 2016, we bought a small plot of land in the Appalachian Valley and built a tiny-ish, Scandinavian-inspired home from the ground up. It was our ode to minimalism. It wasn’t super tiny (1000sqft), but it was certainly small by most people’s suburban “McMansion” standards. We were bucking the status quo: we bought land, we built a home, we had only one kid, and we were happy not to be living in “Pleasantville” like so many of our friends (aka suburban hell).

The act of building from scratch, reworking endless grid-line schematics, was meditative for me. I loved the process of designing (and didn’t know at the time that I was planting a tiny seed). We moved into our one-bed, one-bath house in August 2017, when I was seven months pregnant. We were in such a rush to get out of my parents’ basement that we barely thought about decor. We just slapped in our old apartment furniture and prayed it “worked.”

It didn’t. But we were too sleep-deprived to care. We had a newborn and were trying to survive our first winter on three acres, learning to become stewards of the land and of a tiny new human, simultaneously.

Our home was sparsely decorated; nothing really made it feel like “us”. We thought we were being smart by living with less; turns out we lost our personalities in the process.

What I also didn’t know was how much motherhood would change me, and how much living in a small, isolated home would erode my sanity.

The problem was twofold: I suffered, unmedicated, through two years of brutal postpartum depression which perfectly collided into the start of the pandemic, further prolonging my suffering. Emerging from the worst of the pandemic, I was bleary-eyed, aimless, in need of a creative outlet. I was desperate to regain some semblance of who I was.

Enter: Collecting vintage (or hoarding, depending on who you ask).

As the pandemic lingered, I took the time to examine my surroundings. It started with small projects. Painting a bedroom here. Adding curtains there. I found myself endlessly scrolling online auction sites in search of interesting art for the walls. The packages were piling up.

This process slowly reawakened my old love of collecting and curating. Instead of fashion, my interest this time was geared towards interior design. I’ve always been a seeker of beautiful things.

So, I began driving around the back country near our home and “treasure hunting” in the barns off dusty one lane roads. Pulling onto the kind of properties that make you double check that your cell service is working properly... just in case. There was lots of digging. Lots of dusting things off. And lots of “Ooo, look at this! Where can we put this?” comments made to my husband. Except, remember, we have a tiny-f*cking-house! There was no extra space for anything.

But I was good at finding treasures. Years of training my eye meant I was adept at spotting “the good stuff”. So, I started buying things regardless of whether I had somewhere for it to go in my house or not. Which quickly lead us to having a ton of stuff and nowhere for it to go.

We had no garage on our land, but we did have two empty 20’ shipping containers – so I filled them.

Today, things are different. I’ve built a business around treasure hunting and opened a brick-and-mortar store in 2024. We’ve also moved out of that tiny-ish house (that’s a whole story for another day) and into something bigger and less isolated. Our new-to-us home is old and has a history. I’ve been filling it with treasure; things that tell a story.

I thought I wanted to be a minimalist; I didn’t. I wanted to be creative, but I was living in a manner that wasn’t aligned with being able to fulfill that desire. Finding things and helping them find a new home helped me. The “things” healed me.