When is the last time you’ve looked at the art on your walls?
If you’ve become numb to the art hanging in your living room or bedroom it ceases to function. Like a broken dishwasher, the art is not serving its purpose if you don’t even notice it.
Your art today should reflect your life today. Keep things fresh! Has your decor evolved since your college dorm room days?
Art is suppose to invoke a positive mood, inspire us, intrigues, make us see the world in new ways. If it becomes stale, it’s probably time to rotate or replace it with something fresh.
Art doesn’t have to be a lifetime commitment. It’s ok to refresh your walls with new artwork just like you get new furniture from time to time.
I was reminded of this while transferring some old slides from my Dad. I have three or four cigar boxes full of slides from 50 years ago. There in slides of my grandparents old house in Cromwell, CT was some of the same art that currently hangs in my mom’s condo in Florida!
I’m reminded of this every time I visit some of our old college buddies. There in the living room are framed posters of classic paintings from a museum complete with a blue tint from years of fading under the skylights.
They don’t even notice the color change because they have ceased to see this art after twenty years of never changing the artwork. You’d think tastes would change in twenty years, right?
On another wall, another time capsule from the late 1980s. Framed Ansel Adams black and white landscape posters. There is nothing that screams 1988 more than a framed Ansel Adams poster. I even had one or two.
The Coop in Harvard Square sold them by the pallet full to students from Harvard, Boston College, Bentley, Boston University, Tuffs, Berkley etc. looking for affordable “sophisticated” artwork.
Ansel Adams had finally figured out how to cash in on his portfolio of black and white landscape photographs through licensing thanks to one of his students who took on the task. Adams work suddenly was every where on calendars, posters, framed prints and greeting cards. Now you can date stamp someone by the Ansel Adams poster on the wall.
A couple of years back, at an open house day at my son’s high school, I spotted an Ansel Adams poster on the art teachers wall and I knew, we were roughly the same age. She probably hung that poster when she first got the job.
Art Should Reflect Your Life Now
Unless you still wear wrestling pants, sit on a beer stained futon and still drive an AMC Pacer, the art on your walls should reflect your life now, not a dorm room circa 1987.
After a decade everything else in your life has probably changed – new job, new apartment or house, new car, new furniture, new city, new partner – why shouldn’t your artwork change also?
Wall art is that finishing element that can help pull a space together and make it feel complete. It is that little extra touch that can take your space from simply looking functional to appearing as if it should grace the pages of an interior design magazine.
