I guess I’ve been a little obsessed with walls and wall art the latter half of this week. So I promise this will be my last post about walls and things that go on walls for at least a fortnight or so. What got me thinking about decorative plates was these decorative plates that used to adorn my grandparents’ walls – they were illustrated with extremely striking images from old Russian folk tales and they were my introduction to stories like The Snowmaiden and Ivanushka the Simpleton. These particularly decorative plates were really very beautiful – I think they were issued by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and were based on paintings by noted artist Boris Zworykin. But even so, when I think decorative plates, my brain always jumps to the dorky commemorative plates that were advertised on TV when I was a kid.

In other words, I have mixed emotions about decorative plates. But after looking around a bit, I’ve found that a plate display can be pretty cool, especially when you’re using cool plates and not weird commemorative plates featuring politicians, baseball legends and dead Hollywood icons. Here are a few examples:

I'm liking the swoop

Pretty!

Fun decorative plate designs by Christopher Paul

So what do you think? Can decorative plates move past their terrible 1980’s incarnations, back to the days when people who just hang pretty plates up in lieu of art or photographs? Or have they been ruined by their association with people who can’t stop buying Franklin Mint products?

This entry was posted on Friday, April 22nd, 2011 at 5:17 am by Christa Terry and is filed under Art, Unusual decor, Walls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.