Deck The Walls With Your Own Stuff

When we bought our first house, we had a large expanse of living room wall to decorate. We decided to shop around for artwork until we found something meaningful to us to hang. When we moved out seventeen years later, we still had a blank living room wall. We never found anything that “spoke” to us, and it took me eleven more years to figure out why. I needed to curate and make wall décor of my own. It wasn’t enough for me to hang the best of someone else’s art or buy something that color coordinated with the room. I really wanted to personalize my space with my own art.

Alas, I am not much of an artist. But I try. A friend wanted to go to one of those studios where they walk you through making a particular painting. I went along just to be sociable, but I wasn’t expecting much in the way of artwork. Against all odds, I was pretty pleased with what I had made. The next day I framed it and hung it in the dining room. A few weeks later I went to another “make your own” and produced something else worth hanging. Okay, it might not hang in a museum, but it’s fine in my house.

Speaking of things that hang in museums, I sometimes question the legitimacy of certain offerings I’ve seen in galleries, giftshops, and craft stores. I’ve taken to playing this game whenever I see artwork. I classify each project in two categories: things that I could reproduce and things that are way beyond me. When I see things that I could reproduce, I ask myself: 1. Do I like it? and 2. Where would I put it if I had it?

When I like it and I have a place for it, I take a picture. I let some time go by. If that time goes by and I still like it, think I can replicate it, and I have a place for it, then I start the project. I’ve been pretty pleased with some of my outcomes, and totally humbled by others.

While wandering through one particular gallery, I saw a nine panel painting that was mostly squiggly lines of paint. I had a bare bathroom that needed color, and this particular piece was predominantly red. Perfect for a pale gray bathroom! I bought 9 little square canvases and a bunch of paint. I set out to replicate the museum work that I swore I would finish in an hour’s worth of work. Wrong! I learned that color is a very tricky thing, and that my squiggly lines were not as good as the artist’s squiggly lines. For my first try, I bought the wrong kind of canvas, and the project had no depth. For my second try, it looked like a collection of scribbles left behind by random kindergartners. My third and final rendition took three weeks of dabbling. In the end I felt ready to hang up the project, despite it not being perfect. To me it represents something I persevered at. My apologies to the original artist whose name I do not know. Chances are he will never use my bathroom.

I have also taken to replicating little projects that I find online. I am not ashamed to admit that many of these projects are aimed toward art students, as in elementary age art students. Having no art background of my own, I have to start somewhere. I’m staring at my closet door. I’m displaying a psychedelic cactus scene, a marker mosaic of nothing in particular, an owl that I traced from a Halloween decoration, a silhouetted village under the northern lights, and my favorite, an ostrich that stares back at me with a piercing glare. I’m sure that better quality can be found in any middle school art room, but I don’t care. These pieces bring me joy because they represent something that I didn’t think I could do, but now I know that I can.