In the beginning, there were posters; posters of movies, then framed posters of old advertisements or cool events attended, but posters nonetheless. When the Mrs. (who'll you see posting here as Melicious) and I purchased our first (and only) home here in SF lo these many years ago (thankfully just before real estate went berserk (make that REALLY berserk) in the Bay Area) we had many blank walls and a goodly number of posters adorning them. This was ok in the beginning, but really only as ok as the 70's tile, formica counters and bland carpeting, which is to say that they did their job of covering blank walls.

In 1999 we discovered two things. The first was Thomas Reynolds Gallery and through him the paintings of Veerakeat Tongpaiboon. Thomas "discovered"* Veerakeat through some paintings that Veerakeat had placed in his parents' Thai restaurant and, following his bliss rented the Victorian that now houses his gallery for six weeks to display and sell the work. The rest is history, er Thomas's history.

The history of The Crionna Collection begins with our first oil painting purchase, shown above. "Aft" is 10" x 8". At the time we were the proud 1/3 owners of an old Hunter 30' sailboat and the painting just spoke to us. We loved Veerakeat's style and still enjoy this painting. Since that time we've become friends of Thomas Reynolds and regulars at his gallery. His ideas about how to collect art made an impression on us and we soon found ourselves with a good number of paintings, mostly purchased from him.

As blogging made its impression on the world I came to know a gallery owner in NY, Edward Winkleman, through the comments section of a blog called Tacitus. Tacitus has changed since then and neither of us post there as often but a while back Edward created a blog just for art. Recently, Edward and I met and he mentioned that our collecting and attitudes about such might be an interesting topic for a blog. In fact, until that exact moment I'd never thought of "collecting" art, but rather purchasing it as something wonderful.

So, here it is, The Crionna Collection. We don't collect in order to be cool or to speculate financially, although IOHO having an art collection is, to us, much more interesting than having say, a nice used Ferrari, or some land on which to build a weekend house, both of which could be had for the value of our collection. We'll post photos of our purchases and discuss what we were thinking when we bought them. Now that we're "collectors", we'll discuss what we think we need to do to enhance the collection. We'll discuss objects of desire that we have yet to purchase, and may never, as well as things that some may call crafts, but that we call art. We'll also pick up on topics of discussion in the art world and try to give a mid-range collectors view on things.

We're open to receiving email questions, but have a comments section that we'll attend to regularly. We're thinking that weekly posts are about right. Check back on Mondays and I'd guess we'll have posted sometime during the week before or on the weekend.

*You'll pardon me if by using this word I give Thomas more credit for bringing Veerakeat to the attention of San Franciscans than is proper, I just couldn't think of a better term and don't know the really detailed story. We certainly discovered him through Thomas and are very grateful.

UPDATE
I believe that Thomas Reynolds can indeed be said to have discovered Veerakeat, only it was at his Aunt's restaurant where the paintings were hung. Also, the size of the piece above is 8x10.