Belfast Bay Shade: Art You Can Live With

By Dina Petrillo, Principal Designer, Belfast Bay Shade Company

Belfast Bay Shade Company is a fast growing cottage industry located in Midcoast Maine. We launched our Maine Botanical Series of fine art lampshades at the January 2013 NYIGF show and are pleased to be returning for the August NY NOW show with two new shade lines as well as a line of black iron lamp bases.

Visit www.belfastbayshadecompany.com, call 207-735-8237 or stop by booth 9103 at NY Now.

The response to The Maine Botanical Series has proven we have an appeal for designers, home decor showrooms, fine gift retailers and custom collectors – the series strikes a special chord with folks who want to bring their gardens indoors all year round. The shades are dynamic and full of color. Influenced by American Folk Art, the Arts and Crafts Movement, Japanese Akari lanterns, and Bauhaus, our shades have been likened to fire-light and glasswork with two distinct life forms – unlit they are fine art prints, and electrified they are glowing pieces of art. Our fusion aesthetic continues to evolve with a consistent design goal: to create enduring and beautiful functional design, making art we can live with.

These hand-printed lampshades come in 14 botanical motifs, and our diverse palette of paper and ink colors has generated more than 40 different shade designs. The Maine Botanicals are printed with 100 percent archival materials on etching presses to produce an emboss with the look and feel of brocade. The result is a fine art lampshade with a luminosity that’s simply stunning.

Our shades are durable. While sharing the look of rice-paper lanterns or delicate silk-painted shades, our lampshades are robust – UVLS protected for color-fastness, cleanable, dent and dust resistant. In terms of functionality, these shades are also very versatile. With 11 shade sizes, our lampshades work on any lamp style, including swag, track, hardwire ceiling-hung pendants, floor lamps, table lamps and sconces.

Excitement about The Maine Botanicals has prompted us to create a couple of new shade lines: White on White Botanical Emboss and Linen Botanical. The Emboss Series is etching-press printed for a sculpted relief surface in all white 100 percent cotton. This is an elegant shade available in 14 botanical motifs and 11 sizes. The Linen Botanical Series, printed on a linen/cotton blend, riffs on the hand-printed botanicals and opens up a whole new world of possibilities for size, color, and motif. We’ll be debuting our new line of metal bases for table, floor and sconce in black and malleable iron. These are very hip, contemporary, retro-industrial, must-see items! Together with the organic feel of our shades, these lamps are dynamite!

We’ve been highlighted in DownEast Magazine’s “Your Perfect Maine Home” as their favorite for lighting in Home Accessories, featured in the Farnsworth Art Museum’s Summer Quarterly, HomeBody, NYNOW Crafts Report and Pre-show Planner, cited as Belfast’s New Creative Economy Business, and are exhibiting with architect Augusto Rosa in Bright Holmes Designer Showhouse in Bar Harbor.

We’d love to see you at our new booth in Designer/Maker Handmade #9103 (front left corner of the exhibition hall) – you shouldn’t be able to miss us!