What does it mean to live with art?

I’m referring to the psychological benefit of living alongside an image which brings us to a place we recognize inside of ourselves. It’s irregardless of the investment and purchase price.

We know we cannot live without art.

It can bring its own unique influence into a room and transform a blank space.Through familiarity, it encourages a smile, like an old friend, having lived with us for years. We are pleased to be joining the non verbal conversation shared by the artist who has the same or similar shared emotion.

Art shows our personality.

At a time when we are frequently popping into someone’s home through Zoom, isn’t it an immediate curiosity to grab a peek at any artwork going on in the background? Perhaps we can glean more revealing information about that person, something we would never have guessed.

Our favorite work can remind us of the people we’ve met, known and loved, the conversations we’ve enjoyed and the gifts we’ve been given. 

Art can serve as a time capsule, recalling the places visited and the vacations taken, a reminder of the fullness of our life.

It can hold childhood memories and often marks how we remember our childhood. I grew up in a five hundred year old house. Decorated with a hodgepodge assortment of ‘artwork’ , it all became very familiar, probably because it was never moved. I mean never! In a dark corner of the dining room lived a tired old print by the dutch painter Pieter De Hooch ‘An interior, a woman drinking with two men and a maidservant.’ In our reproduction, the seated fellow in the fancy pants had eyes that seemed a little off kilter and the smaller smiling young man on the far side of the table doing something comical with a pair of smoking  pipes, appeared a little spooky. But I loved looking at the woman with her back to the frame who holds up a fluted glass of white wine, as if on point of celebration. I enjoyed imagining her face, what was she thinking? And was the maidservant allowed in on the levity?

It was not until I was at art school, during a trip to the National Gallery that I set eyes on the original and saw the painting in it’s full true color.But my first reaction was a sudden intake of breath and the thought ‘that belongs to me, it’s my home’.

Our old house was constructed with plenty of exposed beams. One of these lay directly over my head as I lay in bed. I journeyed into the shadows of that beam with distant bays of shore and land. And I walked with the happy Scotty dog.These images, along with the print on the curtains, a bramble bush of ripe blackberries, soothed me in times of sickness and drew me in to an unfocused point of daydreaming. 

I have gone into picture frames in times of physical pain, grateful for a traveling pattern, a pulse of color, a calling landscape. I think I can recall every picture that hung on the wall at any dentist office I’ve visited.

Paintings that lean in towards the unfocused gets us half way to our mind meanderings.While I was studying in Rouen, I met an artist who took off his thick lensed glasses when he painted. And there’s a fabulous peace to be found when an image invites your eyes to curl around, up and over it’s content while you are off on a daydream that forgets time.

Art can slow down time for a resting point in the day. It’s a chance to cut out the noise. When we align with the work we feel a return to home.