Slowly. Experimenting.
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| An untitled landscape still damp to the touch and perhaps finished or unfinished. Acrylic on canvas. 8x10inches |
Lance has been after me for a while to take up painting. He had just started painting when we met for the third time. The third time is the charm they say: we married. Without any training, he has been honing his skills for the past two and a half decades. He is convinced that given enough practice anyone can take up a new hobby and perhaps develop a real talent for it. I think he is optimistic but I agree with another of his underlying principles: improve yourself. I don't have 25 years to develop my painting but I will give it a shot at least for now because it is fun and meets my desire to create.
Like Lance, I am untrained, but this past year I have taken up painting with some commitment. The occasional attempted painting through the years has proven unsatisfactory and the rare one-off has never merited keeping, and those were most certainly not for display. But as my tastes have expanded and my home has become even more personalized, I have now begun hanging my own paintings. They rotate out on the library shelves changing weekly as new pieces are completed. Some are removed and retouched. Some removed and painted over. They are not great works, not even good in the most basic sense, but they are a reminder to create more art, more beauty, and continue trying new techniques.
Over the years my love for a variety of artistic genres has grown and my eclectic maximalist home boasts a lot of art: paintings, sculptures, photographs, and pottery. Some of the art is traditional. Van Goghs from a museum in the Netherlands hang beside tourist prints from Germany and Switzerland, relics of my childhood, left to me the child of divorced parents who did not want to keep those reminders. My photography shares a wall with paintings and collages and wood cuts from Lance's explorations into art. Landscapes and floral works dominate the walls in other spaces. One small wall now has a growing collection of regionalist painters found on the shelves of seconds shops: no one famous but every one a piece that I simply had to own. An entire row of our children's art sits atop one long wall of our library. My son has painted models of fantasy figures in his den with video game art and maps on the walls. We have art in every room, every single room, including our pantry, the linen closet, and the master closet. I can't imagine a house without art, meaningful art.
