Living with art

I have worked diligently since moving into my new house 6 years ago to fill it with art that feeds my soul.  In the dining room, besides a lovely lithograph that was a present from a friend, I have a collection of plates on the wall that recalls several wonderful trips to Andalucia, Spain.  These are complimented by a Turkish and a Pakistani plate.

In the living room, in addition to a tapestry from Iran, a trial piece woven by one of its nomadic peoples, I now proudly display a painting from India.  When we first moved into the house, I noticed I had a lot of space on the wall opposite the couch.  Because the entertainment equipment was arrayed all along this wall, the space was rather limited for a painting.  It needed to be long and not too tall.  So the quest began.  I looked in catalogs.  I look on the internet.  I looked in museum shops.  Never the right picture for this particular room.  One day we went to a local Indian restaurant and noticed magnificent tempera paintings of scenes with Krishna and the Gopis.  This was folk art, but in a more naturalistic style than we had previously seen from India.  I was fascinated and asked the restaurant owner where these pictures came from.  He said they were the work of one particular painter in a village in India.  He had purchased them on a trip back home several years before.  The next thing he said dismayed me.  "The artist is now very old, and I don't think anyone will paint like this after his death." 

I redoubled my quest to find paintings similar to what I had seen in the restaurant.  But I never came close.  After about 2 1/2 years of looking, I finally gave up and decided maybe I would put up an Asian painting in this spot.  Still, I could never find the right picture.  Eventually, I just gave up looking and I figured, since we had been staring at the blank wall for almost 5 years, maybe the room really didn't need a picture there.  (Hah, the things we tell ourselves to take the sting out of failure!)

So I just gave up and stopped thinking about that blank wall and its need for art.  Almost immediately after that I was in a nearby town in a shop that specialized in women's clothing from India.  In a corner at the back of the shop, the owner had some Indian folk art stuck on pieces of cardboard all in a big stack.  I looked with little enthusiasm, since I had seen so much of this before on the internet.  Imagine my amazement when I turned over the next one and there it was--a magnificent painting of Krishna and the Gopis in a style very similar to the painting in the Indian restaurant, and in the size and format that would be perfect for that blank wall above the media equipment.  Its primary color scheme was a gentle spring green balanced by the blue of the sky and water of a lake.  The figures were not handled with quite the aplomb of the pictures I had seen in the restaurant, but in the reduced size of this picture, the more stylized figures added a charm that had been missing from the bigger work.  I was almost afraid to turn the picture over and look at the price, sure it would be difficult for me to purchase this work now that I had finally found it.  Surely I was meant to have this painting--the price was ridiculously low (it cost me 3 times the cost of the painting to have it framed).

Now, a year later, I know it was worth waiting to find this picture.  Not only does it "fill the space", but it has added a very different energy to this room.  The greens and blues have added a calm serenity to a room that up until then had been dominated by the contrast of intense indigo and maroon in the Turkish carpet and Iranian tapestry.  Whenever I sit on the couch to watch a DVD or listen to music, I am aware of that beautiful painting overseeing the proceedings and adding its aesthetic not only to this room, but to the entire house.  Now, when I walk through the font door, the house just feels different, more balanced, more harmonious.

The next project is my home office.  I still have 4 blank walls after 6 years.  I discovered a web site just this week that has folk art from a particular artist in China, scenes of rural life, done in a style that is almost akin to colorful paper cuts.  That has gotten the wheels turning.  Who knows where this will lead.  I am also toying with the idea of putting up a photograph, something by Wing Shya (love his work so much)  I am tired of staring at blank walls when I'm not staring at my computer screen.