The gifts
Now my living room has a painting of a living room.
At Christmas I received a gift of some prints of paintings. It took us a few weeks to get them framed and last weekend they finally came home.
I hadn’t given much prior thought to where they would go or how they would work there. I’d just seen the little square versions on Instagram, liked them, and directed my partner to the artist’s website when he was scratching his head over Christmas ideas.
The paintings in question are of rooms. The artist does nice enough work on other themes, but it’s his rooms that stand out.
So now we had the question of where to put these paintings of rooms. After some hemming and hawing we perhaps inevitably put the painting of a living room in our living room. And the painting of a hallway, which has the focal point of some books on a desk, is up on the wall of my study alongside my bookshelves.
So we have these paintings of rooms hanging up on the walls of the rooms they represent, and in these painted rooms there are naturally painted walls and upon these painted walls hang painted paintings.
(Due to the impressionistic nature of the painted paintings it is not possible to affirmatively declare that they in their turn depict further rooms, much as I enjoy the idea. At least one of them has a pale blue upper quarter above earthen colours so it could reasonably be read as a landscape, but the question is hardly settled.)
The level of satisfaction this state of affairs has given me is unreal. Like, a bodily satisfaction. Looking at these squares of colour is like eating good food. Some of this is probably the visual illusion of depth - instead of plain flat wall there is now the appearance of extensions backward into some extra spaces - but it’s also just the rightness of the correspondence that grabs me every time I look at them.
Why has my living room never before contained a painting of a living room? Why is everything automatically better, more meaningful, more real, once we have made or displayed an artificial, miniature (or giant) (or lifesize), stylised (or realistic) (or hyperrealistic) (or abstract) version of it?
I cannot explain it, I only know that it is, and I share this with you, that you too may partake: so that as you read on the rectangle of your screen in the cube of your room, you imagine the rectangle of my painting hanging upon the rectangle of my wall in the cube of my room, and now my room and its room are also in your room. Does it work that way? I reckon it was worth a shot.
