Some fairy tales are both sweet and spooky. They draw you into fanciful worlds and lead you past big, bad wolves, wicked queens or gingerbread houses belonging to witches. For mixed media artist Vanessa Valencia, antique storybooks and old-fashioned fairy tales inspire both her décor and her art. “One of my passions is writing stories, and so my illustrations and paintings often are born from a story I have created in my mind surrounding the piece, even before I begin painting,” Vanessa says. As soon as the early morning air becomes autumnally crisp, she begins decorating her two homes for the season and hosts hauntingly beautiful and playful teas. “For me, it’s about reliving the joys of my childhood, year after year,” she says. She has the best childhood memories of autumn gatherings, making costumes and going to carnivals, and she can still smell the caramel corn baking in her mother’s oven and hear the bubbling sound of the candy apple mixture right before the apples were dunked in. “I love capturing all of this with my parties and décor,” she says. Creative License. Vanessa has always been a creative. “When I started painting while young, it was like a portal into another time or place,” she says. At fifteen, she was painting flowers and vines on her walls and giving her furniture whimsical facelifts, and, by nineteen, she was selling her art in an art gallery in Tucson. She’s evolved over the last several years in many ways and has done more trunk shows and art tours then she can count but has always managed to stay true to that young girl who began creating all those years ago. Now, she sells globally online, shares the behind-the-scenes of her artistic life on her blog, and has had her work licensed to adorn a menagerie of goods, from umbrellas to mugs to totes. ABOVE LEFT • Pressed Flowers. Vanessa is drawn to the depth of character of dried owers.“It’s fascinating the way they change their shape, and the way the colors deepen so profoundly,” she says.They add a layer of interest the same way that vintage items do, with their worn and tattered beauty speaking to you. ABOVE RIGHT • Hand of the Witch. The witch’s hand always holds court in the center of Vanessa’s Halloween displays.“I found the hand at an antique store a couple of decades ago, and I painted it. It has been one of my favorite nds to date,” she says.The hand denitely packs a punch because it sometimes looks real and adds to the overall spooky vibe. It’s an eerie contrast to the stack of classic teacups it holds. 104 HOLIDAYdécor | 2022
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDI3NTMw