Art on the Walls

On the way to Pittsburgh to celebrate a milestone, I said to Lynn, "I want to start an art budget that we prioritize every year.   I want the kids to grow up seeing art on the walls and knowing things about those artists and believing that making a life devoted to beauty and truth and sacrifice is something we value."

She was game and at the Three River Arts Festival the next day I fell in love with this painting.  The artist Susan Hodgin told me that it was one of three paintings that she made from a dream she had had.  Once the ice cave part of the dream it had turned into a quite terrible dream, but that only made her remember with stronger happiness how serene and beautiful the forest had been before she and her friends arrived at the cave.  I slept on the decision - I would in fact spend the entire art budget for the year only two days after making up the art budget on just one painting.  But I wandered around the entire art fair and nothing spoke to me like that piece.  I had a strong sense of YES - and since I am usually a person who lingers far too long on the undecided fence, I took the plunge.

I like to imagine that buying that painting brought a little more dream world into my own habitas, but I also just love gazing at the colors and contours.

I felt the wind knocked out of me when, a few years ago, I checked in on her art (which, happily, had since become far far more expensive than I could afford) and found out that she had died of cancer.  She was near my age.  It made me love the painting more -- a painters life goes on as long as their visions inspire us.

While her piece was the first it was not the last, since then I have collected so many beautiful pieces from so many artists.  Having art on my walls is partly about valuing the work that other artists make, but it's also a reminder to turn everything into art.  But that's a subject for another blog post....