Every Day Since 1964, this Outsider Artist Made a Collage of Found Objects

New Yorkers have a special relationship with trash, which is as much a fixture of the cityscape as the Manhattan skyline. Not to wax romantic about littering, but some of that, shall we say, “street ephemera” – the lost tickets, photos, business cards – can give us the most honest, intimate window into the city’s…

We Found a California B&B that Might be Madder than the Madonna Inn

As unabashed lovers of the more-is-more mantra, we were destined to fall in love with “The Victorian Mansion at Los Alamos” – which is anything but Victorian, in a way. It can be a 1950s drive-in, or a Parisian escape; a pirate’s lair, or a gladiator’s delight. The last Victorian estate in the area, this mansion-turned-B&B…

A Time Travelling Greenwich Village Studio Hides an Incredible Art Collection

Wait for no muse. Make a habit of working all the time. Let your wooden sculptures grow up, and your bronze sculptures grow out. Such was the world according to Chaim Gross, the patron saint of bohemian Greenwich Village. As an Arts educator, he was bar none in passion and gave playfully acerbic advice (this…

She Was India’s ‘Frida Kahlo’

The bold red lip. The dark, enigmatic brows. Leaning up against the wall with her hair braided tight, the young woman looked every bit like Frida Kahlo, posing for a shot with her photographer-lover. She was also an artist – albeit, comparatively unsung – in her own right. Meet Amrita Sher-Gil, India’s answer to Frida’s…

Artists and their Bohemian Ateliers

This is the Parisian atelier of painter Jules Thulot, little-known today, but in this photograph we get an intimate look inside his personal space. A fabulously bohemian lair, begging to be explored inch by inch. It was the discovery of this photograph that sent me on my hunt for today’s compendium of artists in their…

House of a 1920s Lady Gaga

“Eccentricity exists particularly in the English, and partly, I think, because of that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that is the hallmark and birthright of the British nation.“. ― Dame Edith Sitwell of Renishaw Hall Renishaw Hall may look like a very traditional English estate, but for the last four centuries it has been the ancestral…

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My London Pied à Terre

Having grown up a London girl, I always feel too guilty and awkward to stay in a hotel when I go back to visit, so I usually end up crashing on someone’s couch. But London is becoming home to some of the most interesting boutique hotels in the world as of late, which means I’m…

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Road Trip to Afghanistan: Snapshots From the Lost Hippie Trail

Before the trail grew cold, you could once catch a bus from London to Delhi with just $45, and for a little extra, you could take the scenic route into the Indian subcontinent via Turkey, Lebanon, Kashmir, Iran and Afghanistan, stopping at hotels, restaurants and cafés along the way that catered almost exclusively to cannabis-smoking Westerners. They…

Beautiful Tomboys of the 1930s

I was tumbling through Tumblr, one of my favourite places on the internet to discover history’s lesser-known muses and there, on page thirty-something of my browsing, I stopped at a photograph of an androgynous woman taken by Marianne Breslauer, a name unfamiliar to me. As I began googling her work, my screen was soon taken over by black…

Dreamy Paintings of a Bohemian Surfer

If I’m ever asked who my favourite artist is, I think I’ve always had the bad habit of saying the name of someone else’s favourite artist, or a buzzing artist I was supposed to like or know about. But recently, I discovered some art I really, really like. Jules de Balincourt’s paintings make me think of several things, such as;…