Decorating Your Home With Art: An Artist's View

People tend to buy art with 2 very different mindsets:

• the artwork moves them, and they want it to be part of their life
• the colors in the artwork match their rug and couch

There's really no right or wrong way to purchase art:

       If you buy art because it speaks to you, you will find a way to incorporate it into your home.

       If you buy art because it matches your decor, your decor most likely reflects your interests, your color preferences and your lifestyle: so in reality, you buy art because it speaks to you.

Above you see 3 paintings in my Orchids of Vietnam Series: clearly, I love the bold bright tropical colors and have incorporated them throughout the room.

5 Tips on Buying Art for Your Home

1. Don't buy it unless you love it. You're going to be looking at the painting or sculpture for a long time, so only by something that you want to look at every day.
2. Look for art to purchase while you're on vacation. After dinner in the city you may stroll past some galleries, near the beach is a weekend artisans' show, the ski resort has art work for sale. Each of these pieces can evoke a special memory of a time you enjoyed, and you bring that feeling back home with you.
3. If the colors in the art don't match the room, the room can be tweaked.Or you'll find another room to display the piece you love. Things in a room don't have to match each other, they have to come together show who you are. And a piece that stands out and is different can become the focus point of any room.
4. Don't rush just to fill a blank wall.If the blank wall truly bothers you, buy a poster or another inexpensive 'placeholder' until you find the perfect art piece that you want to live with every day.
5. Educate yourself before you buy. If you don't yet know what kind of art you want to buy, invest some afternoons in local galleries or museums looking at all different types of art - contemporary, traditional, eclectic, ethnic, landscapes - and find out what styles appeal to you.

Art makes my spirit soar: I hope you too surround yourself with beautiful artworks that speak to your soul.

Shirley

NEW ARTWORK -- MAKING CONNECTIONS

I was so motivated and inspired by my February 28th blog "Countdown to Spring Turquoise," the creation of my latest artwork, "Making Connections," was born.  I love the color turquoise -- it is a happy color. I used blue and green turquoise acrylic paint to ground and compliment the other colors in this abstract.  Painting an abstract, in a loose, painterly manner, is how I love to create --  facing a blank canvas and let the creative juices flow.   It is very liberating for me to create artwork in this manner.  The artwork started out in a position that did not work for me, so I turned it upside down and, VOILA, finished piece, "Making Connections."

Several years ago, I painted, "Manderinfish" using predominately the color turquoise.

Enjoy and have an art-filled life!!  A bientot!