While disclosing it’s a picture of a tree she took in a park just north of Yellow Springs, she refused to spill the beans about how that photo made its way onto the set of the NBC show This is Us.
Said beans will be spilled between 6 and 8 p.m. Thursday when she and husband Tom Heaphy share stories about five of their Itinerant Studio images that have ended up on the television shows This is Us, Allegiance, Queer Eye and Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce and in the Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer movie Trainwreck.
All proceeds of the auction to follow at the Jefferson Street home of Itinerant Studios and Duo Home furnishings will support the Little Art Theatre’s Second Century Campaign to add a new marquee and spruce its home in time for the non-profit’s 100th birthday in 2029.
To obtain a $75 ticket, which includes cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, go to www.littleart.com.
Since relocating to Springfield in 1998, Itinerant Studio, which sells its images strictly to other businesses, has supported local arts programs including Project Jericho and the Westcott House. So, since 2022, has their Duo Home design showroom, which is the kind of boutique setting in which their furnishings and images are sold in cities across the United States.
Although Rulli recalls being contacted by NBC Universal Studios after a trade show in New York City, it’s in those storefronts that set designers – the interior designers of television shows and movies – search intently for images that will add just the right character to their sets and story lines.
“Sometimes they buy it at a store right off the wall and the send me a release to sign to make sure they have all the permissions,” Rulli said. “Or they see me at a trade show and order exactly what they want,” choosing from the variety of sizes that can be printed from a machine at their shop that can turn out a 4-by-8-foot image on a surface that’s two feet thick.
What sets Itinerant apart, though, is the variety of surfaces on which it prints.
The options are recycled aluminum; birch and stained birch (the latter with some of the yellow removed) OSB, which is a variety of floorboard; and textured boards that mimic Venetian plaster and Italian frescoes.
Rulli said she and her husband have “pushed the envelope” with those surfaces in a quest to add movement, texture and depth to their still images.
The This is Us image up for auction is a 40-by-60-inch print on painted board.
Their reputations allow Rulli and Heaphy to do “whatever we want” in their photography, free from any restrictions their customers might impose. Even when they worked for the designers of an accessory line of the toney Mitchell Gold and Bob Williams furniture company, they maintained artistic independence by selecting images that fit the seasonal themes of mood and palate of color the company established rather than creating dictated images.
The pleasure of finding the right match of image and printing surface and talking with others on the same quest in their separate specialties is “where the design world is great,” Rulli said.
“It’s a constantly creative industry” in which others are pushing the envelope in applying artistry to the design of every aspect of something as seemingly everyday as a couch that can be found on the floor of Duo Home.
When talking to a potential buyer, “I’m not just selling a couch,” Rulli said, with her hand on the back of one. She’s describing the finer points of its design, the quality of fabric and wisdom of its selection. In the process she’s also considering the role it may play in a setting and pass along her appreciation of the designers, whom she often has talked to and whose works and lives are as manifest in the finest details of a couch as her and husband’s are in their images.
At such moments, Rulli abandons the art of dodging, suspends all rules and spills every bean she possesses not only to friends but to any person – however itinerant - who may walk in the door.
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