Spotlight on OhPotato

Etsy Buy Handmade ohpotato

I've written here before about my endless quest for small and gorgeous pendants. For those that missed it, suffice it to say all the drop dead gorgeous oh-my-god-I-love-it-so-much pendants are about 2-2.5" in at least one direction. While is wonderful if you are into large jewelry. I am not. Anything over 1" starts looking HUGE. Now, I am sure that this is some sort of bizzare mental hang up and I could wear larger pendants just fine, but...I still like the tiny ones.

So stumbling into OhPotato one day, you will understand why I was convinced that these pendants were going to be huge. They were colorful, hand painted, and carefully detailed. They were dramatic! Fun! Painterly! So naturally they would be the size of small dinner plates. Imagine my ecstasy when I read the description and realized--there was a whole product line of one inch pendants! Hooray!

Jessie's work is a distinctly organic depiction of urban. The buildings bloom in fun and funky colors and hills and water often get more space than the "skylines" in the title. The thick outlines and exaggerated curves might call to mind cartoons if it weren't for the velvety deepth of the color. Even in very small spaces the colors are rich mappings from green to yellow to orange, never falling flat. The color doesn't simply fill the piece, it brings life into it.

The first image shows one of the small pendants that I was so happy to find. This particular pendant shows a glowing city separated from the viewer by a small hill. The hills glows in a rich light that suggest late afternoon, just before dusk. The sky above the cityscape glows bright blue and fades into a vintage dictionary page. The text mimics both clouds the haze of light and pollution found over large cities. Despite being a landscape, the cant of the buildings and the vibrancy of the colors makes this pendant appear joyful and alive--like the city is about to start dancing!



The second image shows what Jessie can do on a larger canvas. In the listing, she writes of the many lampposts that influenced this piece and I can think of several more literary lamp posts that immediately spring to mind. And that is the beauty of the piece. The sketchy quality of the lines and the lack of color on the buildings serves to emphasize only their lack of importance. It doesn't really matter which building is there, only that a building is there. It is the brilliance of the lamppost and the sky that captivated your attention. The drifting clouds, the soft glow of light. And it is because of that that this lamppost can be any lamppost. Any time, any place at all.



Aside from the teeny tiny pendants, which make me so very happy, OhPotato also carries a line of larger, 1.5 pendants made in a similar way. So for all you people out there who like those larger pendants, you can still own your very skyline pendant! The shop also carries several other prints and a line of absolutely wonderful magnets (check out Vernon). This is an excellent place to start shopping if you are looking for one of a kind artworks that your recipient can enjoy all day long.