Nursery Art / Nucleus Art Gallery and Store Review

  Bigger Than My Boat by Montreal artist, Sandrine Mercier. Details here.

I am so excited to finally find the right focal piece for Edie's room! But before I start, I will put it out there that this post is a partial rant of my first-world problem. If you can bear it, by all means please keep reading.



For the past few months I've been searching high and low for "nursery" art work. Let's be honest now. The whole concept of decorating a nursery is more for the mother than the child. Really, other than a clean and safe crib, does the baby really care what's in her room? So until she's a bit older, the art is all for me to enjoy.

From cute little pink bunnies to vintage baby food ads, there's no shortage of nursery art. But I don't do girly and I don't like getting ripped off. If the print is a no-brainer "design" that I can whip up in Illustrator, then I'm not buying it. There's tons of those on Etsy.* A shape of a bird with cute print design inside the shape, and you can even pick the colour(s) of your choice. They ARE cute, but it's just so...I dunno, not inspiring...? Not that we have to put some Picasso or Monet prints up to jump start our art history education, but I just wanted something not so...argh I dunno, I'm not doing a good job explaining. (But isn't that the point? That a piece should just make you think "OH COOL I LOVE THIS!" and you can't quite explain it with words? I blame this art fart moment on my artsy high school.)

I did manage to find some purchase-worthy prints online, but I also had to consider the colour scheme and size against the non-white room of Edie's nursery. We painted Edie's room a greenish-gray non colour, because I couldn't find the furniture at the right prices (ie. lovely warm wood) to make it a white wall room , and we had just enough of that colour to finish a small room. If the walls were white, no problem. Gray? No issues. But just that small hint of green makes it so much harder to work with. Then there's the size of the prints. With the ones I did like, they went up to a 8x10, way too small for the wall just above the dresser.

If you can't stand this post by now I totally get it. I'm starting to get annoyed at myself!! ok but I will finish it and let you judge me, yes.

Then one night while looking for a Totoro print, I found this wicked art source. Meet Nuclues, which is an art gallery in Alhambra, California. Lucky for me, they also offer art work and prints online. The prices are totally reasonable, the offerings are varied but curated (e.g. Allposters.com 300 pages of crap made me want to cry), and the search conditions (by colour, size, format) didn't make me want to shoot someone (like Etsy). I had some questions and fired off an email, and the next day I received a very friendly and helpful email from the gallery director himself. Maybe because I'd been ignored by two other online stores that week, but the quick and direct response impressed me for sure. My prints arrived two weeks later in a flat box (yay no roll-ups!). Each print was in its own clear art protector and backed by a sturdy piece of cardboard. No weird markings, no corners dinged, everything was perfect.

If you know my spending habits, buying three items as a first time purchase is not like me at all (I'll usually get zero). But what I really wanted were about a dozen other prints, so three for now is conservative! In addition to the Sandrine Mercier piece above, I got two more.


  Big head by Khang Le for Edie, and We Spent it Well by Chris Appelhans. I love so many pieces from Appelhans and hope to catch an original next time.

Great product, easy to use website, good customer service. I will definitely repurchase at Gallery Nucleus. Too bad they're not in my neighbourhood. I'd love to see the Appelhans pieces in person! If you're going to make a purchase at Nucleus, make sure you look up the coupon code...it's cute.

*For the record, there's a lot of crap on Etsy, but there are some amazing artists as well. If you want to check out some great Etsy art shops, here are my picks. Care to share your favourite art source?

P.S. Here's the Totoro print I was trying to find (The green one). It went on sale for $90 and a quick search on ebay is showing current prices at $850 and up!