I have a melancholy nature that is drawn to gothic styles and designs. It draws me to Victorian novelists like Emily Bronte and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as poetesses like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. I think of the tempestuous moors where Heathcliff and his beloved Cathy run free as children before the bitterness of love did them both in. I’m a visceral artist so when I create designs there is always an intention behind them symbolizing whatever moves me at that time.

I was inspired by the brooding but beautiful darkness in the new redesign with prima decoupage paper Uniqua. It gave me the direction that I took with this unusual china cabinet. It’s always difficult to settle on one design when there are so many different ways one can go about it. I decided to go gothic Victorian with blacks, black sapphire, whites, and powdered pink blush patina. For the sides I created silver stripes with my super easy striping method using Rustoleum’s Imagine silver spray. I also added the new transfer Vintage Dream to compliment the decoupage paper’s floral colors. I adore the lighter florals on this one. I also used the vintage wallpaper stamp with paint. The interior I painted an off-white and added the floral court transfers. I dabbed on a bit of finnabair’s denim wax to imitate the pop of blue in the decoupage paper.

One of my favorite poems is Anne Sexton’s Her Kind where she describes being an outcast, not a conventional woman, especially during the time when women were expected to be domestic goddesses. She speaks metaphorically of the different personas she’s inhabited that are all misunderstood. Each one lonely and cast out by society. It’s a dark poem, but for those of you all too familiar with depression, I think you can understand the thoughts that we dwell in during those low times. Sometimes the darkness can result in beauty. When you take all the sadness and turn it into something that can be shared to help others. It can comforting at its best.

Her Kind by Anne Sexton

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods;

fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

whining, rearranging the disaligned.

A woman like that is misunderstood.

I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,

waved my nude arms at villages going by,

learning the last bright routes, survivor

where your flames still bite my thigh

and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

A woman like that is not ashamed to die.

I have been her kind.