✎Subscriber thread: choose your art
What would you hang on your wall?
Hello,
In Sunday’s journaling prompt, I wrote my cheeky question I used to ask people on art gallery tours: Would you hang it on your wall?
It often made people uncomfortable, because they knew they were supposed to think of higher things in a gallery. But it’s also completely legitimate. Art can be challenging and edgy, but sometimes it’s also just lovely to look at. It can also be both.
So today, I thought I’d turn the question over to you:
If you could choose any piece of art to hang on your wall, what would it be?
Don’t overthink it - just speak from the heart. For me, my gut response was Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose by John Singer Sargent. In my younger days, I thought it was a bit naff, but I spent a long time working with it in the Tate, and I grew to love it. Nowadays, I’m allowed to just find it beautiful. It captures a moment of childhood and summertime so perfectly. Also, it would look great in my study.
Over to you - please feel free to link to your art if you can!
Katherine
This may sound self-centered, but I enjoy hanging my work. As a photographer for over four decades, I have numerous nature and landscape images I can choose from to print and hang. Some of my favorite prints remain on my walls, while I frame and hang newer work at other times.
So wish we could share images here! I'd choose Sabine by Alison Watt:
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/59538/sabine
I've been obsessed with this painting since 2000 when she was the youngest woman to be given a solo show at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh with Shift. It features in the novel I'm working on just now and the lack of traditional narrative (the kind I'd grown up with and the narrow lens through which I discussed paintings - background, middleground, foreground) has given me a structure around which to write, and I felt it a sign when I found a print of it hanging on the dining room wall at Moniack Mhor last winter where I'd gone to work on the manuscript.
I said the other day in the comments on your post, Katherine, that I struggle to stand still with a piece of art but this one is the exception. I probably go to see it every couple of years and I always find something new, or come to it with a different perspective or emotion. I used to imagine the folds of fabric like drapery, hanging vertically as the painting does. Now, though, I see them as crumpled bedsheets. Thanks for this prompt - really enjoying reading others' responses.