Please welcome the newest installment of artist inspirations. We have asked some very talented artists, illustrators, designers and crafters to share some things that help inspire them. So each monday stop by an take a sneak peek into the swatch files and bulletin boards of some of your favorite artists. This week’s inspiration board is from the multi-talented Jessica from Miniature Rhino. 

I’d like to call myself a collector. I obsessively search out and hoard books, snapshots, stones, keys, sea glass, ephemera, and even digital images for reference and inspiration. The objects I collect have an age and history, things that tell a story. Photography, art, science, museums and archives, the cabinets of curiosity, natural history, and Victorian traditions are all sources of inspiration. Here are a few images from my archive (clockwise-from right).

I love daguerreotypes and images within images… My collections are stored in a library card catalog, so I can pull the drawers and see the objects in serial… An image by the photographer Harry Callahan of his wife Eleanor. I like photographers who point the camera at their own lives…. Ernst Haeckel’s  images of sea life. Amazing and full of wonder…the curiosity cabinet of Ole Worm with ostrich egg, turtle shell, polar bear, armadillo… the tradition of making Samplers. Making them connects me to a history of craft and learning…family heirlooms like my grandparent’s letters…a daguerreotype, the butterfly collector, from the George Eastman House collection. Get lost in their archive … an image of hands from Gary Schneider’s series Genetic Self-Portrait. He included in this series images of his families hands pressed onto photographic paper, heat and sweat creating the image….a field guide to birds, silhouetted, numbered and cataloged….center, family photographs and found images. This one is of my mother and aunts and uncle on Halloween. The details in images kill me (like my mom’s-the little drummer in yellow- high water pants) so I take them out sometimes and look at them over and over again.  

I loved sharing this and hope you enjoyed it too! – Jessica