Thrifted Treasures | #6 – The Artyologist

There’s something almost meditative about a slow walk through a thrift store. The soft clatter of hangers, the faint smell of old paperbacks, the occasional flash of something unexpected tucked between the ordinary and the overlooked. If you’ve been following along with this series, you already know that Thrifted Treasures is my ongoing love letter to secondhand shopping — a place where I share the finds, the misses, the styling ideas, and the quiet joy of giving something old a brand new life.

This is installment number six, and honestly? It might be my favorite one yet.

I came home with a haul this time around that genuinely surprised me. Some pieces I saw the potential in immediately. Others took a few days of living with before I understood exactly what I wanted to do with them. That’s one of the things I love most about thrifting — it asks you to slow down and think creatively rather than buying something because it was designed and marketed to fit a very specific hole in your wardrobe. The thrift store doesn’t curate for you. You have to do the work yourself, and there’s a deep satisfaction in that.

So let’s get into it. Here’s everything I found, how I’m styling it, and a few thoughts on the thrifting process that have been on my mind lately.

The Haul

The Oversized Blazer

First up is the piece I’m most excited about: an oversized blazer in a warm camel-and-cream plaid. It’s structured at the shoulders but has that slightly boxy, relaxed cut that’s so versatile for layering. The lining is still perfectly intact, the buttons are original and beautiful — a slightly matte tortoiseshell resin — and there’s not a single moth hole or stain in sight. I found it hanging at the very end of the blazer rack, almost as if it had been waiting patiently.

The tag inside reads a brand name I don’t recognize, which is often a good sign at the thrift store. It usually means the piece is older, predating the era of fast fashion, and was made with considerably more care. The fabric has that satisfying weight to it that modern blazers rarely have. The kind that drapes rather than hangs.

I paid four dollars for it.

I’ve already worn it three different ways. Thrown over a simple cream ribbed turtleneck with straight-leg jeans and loafers, it reads effortlessly put-together. Belted loosely at the waist over a floral slip dress, it bridges the gap between the masculine and the feminine in a way I find endlessly appealing. And most recently, I draped it over my shoulders like a cape while running errands, which sounds more dramatic than it actually looked — it was raining and I was cold, and it turned out to be a very practical solution.

This is exactly the kind of piece that justifies every single mediocre thrifting trip where you come home with nothing. One blazer like this makes it all worth it.

The Ceramic Pitcher

I’ve been deliberately cultivating my thrifted home collection lately, and I found something genuinely lovely in the housewares section: a ceramic pitcher in a deep, uneven sage green glaze. It’s clearly handmade — the walls are slightly irregular, the base is a little wobbly, and there’s a thumbprint pressed into the clay near the handle that the maker either left intentionally or simply didn’t notice. I like to think it was intentional. A small signature.

There’s no mark on the bottom to identify the artist or the origin, which I find both frustrating and charming. It exists outside of provenance, outside of collectible value, outside of the kind of categorization that drives prices up. It’s just a beautiful object that someone made with their hands, and now it lives on my kitchen counter holding a few stems of dried eucalyptus.

I think about the hands that shaped it sometimes. The fact that it found its way to a thrift store shelf, survived the journey, and is now sitting in natural light in my home — there’s something quietly wonderful about that chain of custody.

The Linen Trousers

These almost didn’t come home with me. They were folded on a shelf rather than hanging, which meant I nearly missed them entirely, and when I unfolded them I wasn’t immediately sure they were my style. High-waisted, wide-leg, in a natural undyed linen with just the faintest texture. Very minimal. Almost severe in their simplicity.

But I held them up and looked at them for a long moment, and something clicked. I thought about the blazer I’d just found. I thought about the white linen button-down I’ve had for years. And I thought about how I’ve been gravitating toward a quieter, more considered wardrobe lately — fewer pieces, better quality, more intentional choices.

These trousers fit that vision perfectly. They’re slightly too long for me, but a simple hem is one of the easiest alterations in the world, and even without it they work well with a slightly stacked heel. The fabric is that wonderful heavy linen that wrinkles in the most beautiful, lived-in way. Not the thin, limp linen that loses its shape immediately, but the kind that creases deliberately and looks better the more you wear it.

Three dollars. I still can’t quite believe it.

The Stack of Art Books

No thrifting haul of mine would be complete without a few books, and this time I found a small stack that genuinely made my day. A battered but complete copy of a Matisse retrospective catalogue from a museum exhibition in the early nineties. A slightly water-damaged but still beautiful monograph on Japanese woodblock printing. And a slim, perfect paperback anthology of essays on color theory that I’ve already started reading and can’t put down.

I buy art books from thrift stores whenever I can. Partly because I love them and they’re expensive new, but also because I think of them as vessels for someone else’s enthusiasm. Someone bought that Matisse catalogue because they saw the exhibition or wished they had, and they brought it home and put it on their shelf and looked at it for years. Now it’s on my shelf. Now I’m looking at it. The enthusiasm travels forward.

The color theory anthology in particular is already proving revelatory. There’s an essay in it about Josef Albers and the way he thought about simultaneous contrast — the phenomenon where a color appears different depending on what surrounds it — that I’ve been thinking about all week in relation to my own work. Six dollars for all three books. Worth every penny and then some.

The Amber Glass Vase

Small, round-bottomed, with a narrow neck and the most beautiful warm amber color — the kind that turns the most extraordinary shade of honey when the light moves through it in the afternoon. I spotted it immediately from about fifteen feet away because the sun was hitting it at exactly the right angle, and I walked straight to it with the kind of purposeful energy that probably looks a little strange to other shoppers.

It joins two other pieces of amber glass I’ve collected over the past year or so, and together they make a small cluster on my windowsill that I find genuinely satisfying to look at. There’s something about collecting multiples of a color or a material that starts to feel like a coherent artistic choice rather than random accumulation. It’s one of the things I love about building a home slowly through thrifting — it develops a visual logic over time.

On the Art of Thrifting

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I thrift — the real reasons, beneath the obvious ones about sustainability and cost. And I think a significant part of it is about the relationship with objects it cultivates.

When you shop new, everything is optimized for desire. The lighting, the display, the marketing language, the carefully curated aesthetic of a brand — all of it is designed to make you want things and feel good about wanting them. There’s nothing wrong with that, exactly, but it does create a particular kind of relationship with objects. You’re acquiring something that was made to be acquired. You’re the intended endpoint.

Thrifted objects have a different energy. They weren’t waiting for you specifically. They’ve had lives already. They’ve been owned and used and, for whatever reason, released back into the world. When you find something and bring it home, you’re choosing it specifically — not because it was made for you or marketed to you, but because you saw something in it. That’s a more active and more personal kind of choice.

I also find that thrifting has genuinely sharpened my eye. After years of moving through racks and shelves looking for quality among the ordinary, I’ve gotten much better at identifying good construction, quality fabric, interesting form, genuine craftsmanship. Those skills translate. I look at everything differently now — furniture at the side of the road, objects at a friend’s home, pieces in a gallery. Thrifting has made me a more attentive visual thinker, and for someone who makes art, that matters enormously.

Styling Notes: Building a Secondhand Wardrobe with Intention

One question I get asked frequently is how to thrift effectively — how to avoid coming home with a bag full of things you’ll never wear, how to find pieces that actually work together, how to build something coherent from something so inherently random.

The most useful thing I can tell you is to know your anchors. An anchor piece is something you already own and love absolutely — a color, a fabric, a silhouette that you come back to again and again. When you’re thrifting, you’re looking for things that speak to those anchors. Not things that are interesting in isolation, but things that will work hard in the context of what you already have.

The camel blazer works because I already have a wardrobe built largely around neutrals and natural fibers. It stepped into a space that was already prepared for it. The linen trousers work for the same reason. If my wardrobe were primarily built around bold prints and saturated color, those pieces might have sat unworn regardless of how beautiful they are.

The second thing is to give yourself time in the store. Thrifting rewards patience. The best finds often don’t reveal themselves immediately. I try to move through the whole store at least once before I commit to anything, because something I dismissed on a first pass will sometimes look completely different in a new light or when I’ve picked up something else that changes the context.

And the third thing — perhaps the most important — is to trust your hesitations. If you’re standing in front of something and talking yourself into it, put it down. The pieces that belong with you create a different feeling. They don’t require argument. You look at them and something just settles. Learn to recognize that sensation and follow it, and your thrifted wardrobe will be far more coherent and far more loved.

A Note on Thrifting and Creativity

For those of you who follow my work as an artist, I think it’s worth saying explicitly that thrifting and artmaking are not separate practices for me. They feed each other in ways I’m still discovering.

The act of looking — really looking — that thrifting demands is the same act that painting demands. The attention to surface, texture, color, and form. The willingness to see potential where others have passed something by. The patience to wait for the thing that is right rather than settling for the thing that is merely available.

The objects I bring home become part of my visual landscape and therefore part of my work. The amber glass on the windowsill has appeared in several paintings now, transformed by light and context into something slightly different each time. The art books accumulate and inform. The blazer draped over a chair in the corner of my studio has been sketched several times in moments when I needed a subject and a visual anchor.

There’s a generosity to thrifted objects in this way. They don’t arrive demanding to be used in a specific way. They arrive with history and with the patina of use, and they make themselves available to whatever meaning you want to bring to them.

What I Didn’t Buy

I always like to include this section because I think it’s as instructive as what I did bring home.

I left behind a genuine tortoiseshell dressing table mirror because it was significantly larger than I’d realized at first, and I have no wall space for it currently. This was a real exercise in restraint — it was beautiful — but I’ve learned that buying something with no place to put it, however wonderful, just creates clutter and eventually regret.

I also left behind a very nice camel wool coat because it was exactly the same color as my new blazer, and I already own a wool coat I love. Owning two nearly identical versions of the same thing is rarely as satisfying as owning one exceptional version.

And I left behind a set of dinner plates in a lovely blue-and-white pattern because, while I admired them greatly, blue-and-white is simply not the direction my kitchen is going. Admiring something is not the same as needing it, and keeping those two responses distinct is one of the things that separates a thoughtful thrifted collection from an overwhelming one.

Final Thoughts

Every installment of this series reminds me of something I think is worth saying again: the best things about thrifting have very little to do with the money saved, though that’s genuinely wonderful too. They have to do with attention, and patience, and the particular pleasure of finding something that was made carefully and has survived, and bringing it forward into a new chapter.

The objects we surround ourselves with shape us in ways we don’t always consciously register. They affect our mood, our sense of beauty, our sense of what’s possible. Filling your home and your wardrobe with things you actively chose, things you saw clearly and loved specifically, is a quiet but real act of self-knowledge.

I’ll be back for number seven whenever the thrift stores call me. In the meantime, I hope this gave you something to think about, and maybe a reason to go looking.

Happy hunting.