This is my desk in our home office. Chris has his desk on the adjoining wall, with a window in front of him when he sits down at the computer. But I wouldn't give up my inspiration wall for anything, even for a window. Which is saying something for me, light addict that I am.
I keep a drawer in the desk for pages out of magazines, old postcards, etc. that I love. An inspiration drawer. For so long I was trying to figure out how to cleverly showcase my favorite images so that I could see them when I was working. I thought about hanging the pictures from a string or wire with little clips (like here and here) or making some kind of cool bulletin board (where did I see someone make one out of about a thousand of those Ikea cork trivets?) But in the end, I decided just to stick them up on the wall with tape. Tiger Beat poster-style. And I love it! They do me a lot more good actually up on the wall than they do waiting for the perfect display system. Looking up at this wall when I work at my desk makes me really happy.
Rip-outs from Vogue and O magazine... Anthropologie and Bonpoint catalogues... art postcards... paintings done by my girls on the rotator painter... a photo of one of my favorite murals in the San Francisco Mission district... a triple spiral carving from Newgrange that will someday be my second tattoo... beautiful ladies of all ages...
Collecting images you like is a funny little way to get to know yourself and your aesthetic. I certainly don't choose pictures just because they relate to other things on the wall, but there are definitely some noticeable overlaps and places of synergy - glowy lights, intense pattern, a rich orange- and blue-heavy color palette, a bit of whimsy... I love the mash-ups that happen on the wall, the conversations between images that are next to each other.
I also set my computer up so that my screen saver is a slideshow of favorite pictures I've culled from the internet. Any time I really respond to an image, I save it into my "beautiful" folder. Sometimes I come back to my desk after a break and the screen saver is scrolling though all those beautiful pictures, and I just sit and watch for a while.
