I don’t most of the time, but sometimes I stop. And spend a moment looking. Doesn’t matter if I made it, or someone else did.
I think if I realized I’d not looked at a piece of artwork in the house for years, i should probably think about taking it down and tossing it into the attic.
So, what piece do you look at the most in your house, and why? Are there pieces of art that you look at a lot more than others, and why?
Let us define art as anything decorative in nature that you have placed in your home that is not wallpaper or draperies. I don’t just mean paintings or photographs or sculpture. Any art at all.
Cartooniverse
A small picture my mom painted about 32 years ago, right before she passed away.
It makes me feel… well, connected.
I look at my art all the time! I love it. Sometimes I will zone out gazing at it when I’m supposed to be doing something else.
There’s a few different kinds of “art” in the house, but as long as you’re defining it as anything decorative, the thing I look at the most is a framed vintage map of my hometown, about 100 years old. I look at it constantly, and use it as a reference when I’m trying to figure out how old something is - is it old enough to be on the map? I get this crazy kick out of finding little differences, like where a street got extended another block. I’m not sure if I should consider this purely decorative because it’s also utilitarian, but it’s very nice looking and hangs in a frame.
My other favorite is an etching of an elephant – it’s an original design, but done in the style of an old children’s primer, and there’s text that admonishes you to “Always keep your elephants calm!” This makes me smile all the time. It’s hard to describe, the illustrative style makes you think it will be one of those children’s texts that tells you to always be polite, or always pick up your toys, but instead it’s about elephants. When I first bought it, I described it to my mother over the phone, and she said she thought it sounded like the dumbest thing ever – and recently, she was visiting and said “You know, I can’t figure out why this is so appealing, but it is!”
I haven’t put anything up on the walls just yet, but I have a few things out to see whether I want to go ahead and commit to having them on the walls. One of them is a pen and ink drawing of some flowers that my mom did probably twenty-five years ago, when she was just starting to pick up art as a hobby. She came over for lunch and noticed it out, and teared up a bit to see it. So, it’ll go up somewhere, for the same “connected” reason Wallet mentioned.
I haven’t got any. I have nothing hanging on any of my walls.
At present, the art on my walls that I look at the most is a “bug jar” quilt which my mother made for me–with help from me. I look at it the most because it’s positioned where it is within my line of sight from where I sit most often. For some reason, when I moved into this apartment, I stuck a lot of my decorative stuff on ledges around the edges of the apartment, and generally ignore them.
Yeah, I do. Mostly I look at one of the Thomas Hart Benton prints. I look at it because I like it, and because it’s a reminder of a change in circumstances. It’s the first thing I bought when things started looking up for me, financially. It was only about $100, but when you’ve been struggling and then aren’t anymore, it’s special.
I have a couple of framed pieces of embroidery my mother did hanging in my living room. As Wallet mentioned, it makes me feel connected to her. And it was also amazing to get out these pieces after painting my living room and realize that things my mother embroidered 30 years ago have colors to go in my living room!
Also, right as you walk in the door is an original by Will Luck. He’s a folk artist from Florida who I saw in a local show, and I love his work. It makes me smile whenever I walk in the door.
There is a beautifully framed photograph of maple leaves in autumn colours that a former doper took. I gaze at it quite often and it makes me think of home. I also have some Native art from Western Canada that I love, but are not up right now.
I do not. But then, I didn’t hang the art in my place. When I was very ill some friends came and cleaned up my place so that I had a better environment to come home to. While they were doing that, they also hung stuff all over.
I’m an artist, and so were both of my parents. I have TONS of art in my house, and stacks of it in the basement and attic. I look at it all the time. I’m amazed by people who come over and don’t even notice it.
I also don’t have any art in my place. I don’t plan on ever displaying any art, unless it’s decoration for other people, so I would have no reason to stop and look at it. Then again, I don’t really believe in art, so my opinions might change if I ever do come to understand why someone feels something from looking at a picture/drawing/sculpture/whatever.
Yeah, that is amazing. Fortunately most of our friends appreciate art and our stuff. My wife is an artist,so we have a lot of her oils and pastels hanging as well as other paintings and sculpture we’ve bought. Got so many, we have to rotate them now and then like an art museum.
We contemplate and admire the art all the time. Once we win the lottery, going to buy those Van Goghs and Mattises we love. Alas, our chances of winning are somewhat diminished by the fact that we never buy tickets.
Great stuff ! I didn’t really contribute a post as others have, which is kinda weird since I was interested in details.
Almost every wall in my home has some kind of art on it. Paintings given to us or a few we inherited after my wife’s aunt was savagely murdered in her home in Philly years ago.
My photos are on quite a few of the walls, though I get tired of them and change the prints around now and again. ( I show at a gallery infrequently and have sold some prints along the way, but mostly shoot stills purely for pleasure ) A wall hanging that is a carpet from Morrocco that’s roughly 7 feet square. Sculptures on lots of surfaces by my FIL ( an artist ) and myself. I like the visual variety, though I do wonder what it would be like to keep the collection but move all of it around the house.
Oddly, I am not sure we have more than one print of a famous work around.
I partially started this thread because i was cleaning today and came across a print of a photo of mine. I shot it in the 1981-1982 school year at Sarah Lawrence College. My GF attended, I did not but I spent a lotta weekends there. It is a shot of a man alone on a dance floor, arms above his head. He was a good man, slight, short, possessed of a gleeful cackle of a laugh that was heard frequently around the place and an immensely gifted dancer. He died of AIDS in the late 1980’s. I want to hang it again and think about Tommy perhaps more than I have in the last 10 years.
Cartooniverse
Anyone posting in here might take a stab at this. Sometimes art draws me in because I see something I wish I could do. Sometimes it evokes strong emotions ( positive or negative ) which resonate after I see the work. Sometimes I have a physical response to a work of art, though usually that is with large installation pieces and not wall art. Take the photo I mentioned in my last post. Is it art? Well, yeah, it’s a pretty nice photo. His image is reflected slightly in the gloss black floor of the dance studio, the moment I caught has a neat post, etc. Is it high art? Meh, who the hell knows? Does it mean something to me? Absolutely, in several levels.
It could be that a work makes me think of a memory. Perhaps the colors remind me of something I own or a place I have seen. Opening yourself to art may well be about opening yourself up to a panoply of outside stimulii that in the end make you look at yourself in new ways.
Everyone is a critic so I would never dare to suggest what is good art, or bad art. If a work that another person created evokes a response or causes you to think about things, then it is work looking at a second time.
Photos, especially of familiar people or places, are easy. They are an accepted representation of reality and take us back to a moment we cherish. Or, lacking cherishing it, at least a moment in time we wish to recall by owning an image from that moment. ( The Great Depression the Dust Bowl and Holocause photographs are frequently both documentary and artistic in nature, while none of the three strike me as great memories or images that please the eye or heart. They are STILL deserving of the monicker of Art. )
I don’t mean this as a slight or attack, ok? Might you perhaps spend some time in a museum or gallery, looking around? Or, to peruse more art in a more time-efficient manner, visit a large chain bookstore and plop down in the Art Books area and peruse some of the huge coffee-table books. Likely most of it will leave you cold- few people rave about all art with equal fervor. But you might well find stuff that moves you and makes you think.
Just a thought. 
Cartooniverse
So, you’re like tone-deaf through the eyes? You don’t find some things more pleasing to look at than others?
The things I look at closely most often: a David Hockney print at the foot of the stairs; two oversized Audubon prints in the dining room (across the room from where I sit at the computer); a '30s-era travel poster for the French Riviera (next to my bed); a tall, narrow vase filled with a variety of marbles, mostly blues, in the sunny window of my bathroom.
Yeah, I look at the stuff we have hanging or sitting around the place. Which is quite a bit, for one reason or another. My mother in law is an artist, my mother is not a bad photographer, and both of them have contributed both some of their own work and gifts of other people’s work. Plus I dabble in various visual media and my husband is getting to be quite handy with a camera so there’s that. Then there’s the joint obsession with ceramics.
Actually, along with books, having art to hang out with is one of the things that makes a home a home to me. When I was little, we were generally pretty broke, but my parents always had art prints hanging, and various textiles, and hand turned wooden bowls and boxes by local artists, and ceramics also by local artists. I can still picture details of bits and pieces they had around the house, both the poster prints of very famous works and the lovely small hand crafted things from the local people.
So I’d say that looking at the art around the home is a seriously ingrained habit. We’re at the point where we really do have to discriminate about what comes into the house though, or we’ll be totally cluttered and not in a good way.
Yes. One thing is as good (and as bad) as another. Sometimes certain things evoke certain feelings, but art never does.
I have several prints of paintings by Gustave Moreau all through the house. I look at them constantly. Here is a photo of the main studio at the Moreau Museum in Paris, which is in his old house. I wish MY house looked like this,
Brooklyn. You must have extremely high ceilings. 
That work is fantastic. I cannot imagine working on that scale. ( Well. I cannot draw or paint either…)
