ON CHOOSING ARTWORK for YOUR HOME

Why do you like looking at one piece of art and dislike others?
Why do some people like a piece of art while other people walk away?
The painting you choose for your home is more than mere decoration - its a mirror of how you want to feel in your space - calm and serene or vibrant and energetic?

It is a basic natural reaction to whatever it is that we see – some combination of shapes and colours, just as we do all the time in gazing around ourselves.
I’m sure this most fundamental reaction is actually also the most important and will override everything else – if people don’t like looking at a piece of work, it won’t matter how highly-praised it is by the critics, nor how ‘important’ it is in the development of art history, the crowds will walk on by. 

Except …. ‘liking’ or disliking is a cognitive reaction, so even art that you don’t like is having an effect in your mind. Sometimes it is the most horrific images that will be recalled most easily. 

The judgement which you, the viewer, apply when gazing on a picture considering whether or not you like what you see, while it boils down to a simple yes or no, requires the application of very complicated processes. 

The first layer of thought is immediate – do you respond favourably to the image presented? Do you like the choice of colours, light and dark? Is it something you consider to be beautiful, or interesting, or both?
And you move into deeper sensations – does the whole effect generate a positive reaction for you?

Here you are judging the aesthetics of the painting in much the same way as we do on listening to a piece of music – does the harmony appeal to you? 

Then there is the presentation of the artwork – from the simple (but absolutely vital) matter of the way it is framed, through the artist’s choice of media – ink, watercolour, oil, felt …. and your assessment of the quality of the workmanship. 

Which leads to the place of the artist in this whole judgement. 

Clearly, any image you are seeing is actually the result of the work of the person who created it: the most mundane might be a webcam streetview from a municipal camera – and even that is the result of decisions taken by a person: where to place the camera, what setting to use on the lens, which angle to show, and so on.
Paintings of the same still life composition by a class of 20 art students will result in 20 very different pictures: the way one artist chooses to present his or her work is more unique than their handwriting. 

A painting is not simply a transposition of nature. It is the artist’s interpretation, an effort to present a fresh piece of creativity, something which will trigger a reaction in the viewer.
Which means that your judgement of a painting will not merely be the sum of the components (composition, colour, frame, media, technique….), but will include relational properties, some unique to you, some generated by your knowledge of the artist and some flowing from the context in which you are seeing the piece.

Our judgement of prehistoric cave paintings is very different from those we expect to see in major new exhibitions. We carefully read the bio-details about where and when the painting was created, the artist’s background and education.
We seek clues about what ‘it’ is that the painting is seeking to convey.

There are whole academic journals dedicated to the cultural interpretation of art – its ontology, its significance in relation to current societal themes, the artist’s place in the spectrum of humanity – philosophers from Socrates, through Hume, and Kant to Wittgenstein have codified the processes associated with judgement of aesthetics: are the ideas presented consistent or challenging in relation to current or past cultural trends? 

I have to say that I doubt if many of the people who have gazed at my paintings had the slightest concern for these issues.
I am also fortunate in enjoying contact with a wide circle of fellow painters, and there too, I can say quite definitely that very few (if any) of those were consciously producing work as a comment on cultural themes!

So – which way up is this iceberg? 

Is it the case that the public who look at art and the majority of artists who create it are merely unconscious of the reality that they are playing parts in a great cultural drama, or is it rather that the academic community have used their huge intellects to invent whole theories and disciplines to codify human behaviour? 

One of the most basic questions facing an artist, and which then concerns the viewers, is about the degree of ’realism’ used in conveying an image – does the painting simply present exactly what is there to be seen, or to what extent should the artist interpret reality?
This most certainly is an issue of concern to the viewers of my paintings and to fellow artists. When I was a teenager, I drew a quick sketch of a little wood on the side of a hill. Someone looked over my shoulder then commented  - “Hang on, that tree is in the wrong place” – he might have been joking, but the remark has stayed with me – what was I doing? Was it about the production of a precisely accurate image of the locations of each tree, a slavish following of nature, or was I producing a drawing that I would enjoy looking at? 

It seems obvious to me that Picasso was correct when he made the assertion that ‘all art is abstract’ – if you are looking at a painting, you are not looking at the real world, you are looking at the artist’s interpretation of it. I have developed a firm belief that it is more important to end up with a composition that is pleasing rather than having each tree in precisely the ‘right’ place. And I was delighted to read a quote from Degas (who painted in his studio from memory) that he sought to ‘escape the tyranny of nature’.
Another was the surrealist Magritte “Ce n’est pas une pipe” – his title of a large painting of …. a pipe!  (“It is not a pipe”) – ie, it is a painting .

Just as ‘the public’ have a broad spectrum of tastes, so too there are artists who take great care to paint precisely what they see while others use a very broad brush and produce art that conveys their feelings.
Delacroix proclaimed (in 1894 or so) that “the first priority of a painting is to be a feast for the eye….”
Cezanne, working in the late 19th century and now recognized as creator of bridges between impressionism and cubism, spent many many hours standing gazing and thinking about his compositions. He found that "the lived perspective, that which we actually perceive, is not a geometric or photographic one." In other words, art is not an exact science but a means of capturing the complexities of what the eye observes.

Now those academics have again written definitions and ‘abstract’ art has been put in a box and is regarded as that which does not seek to precisely mimic reality but rather will attempt to pick up some aspect(s) which will be evocative – the light, the colours, flow, shapes.

This is a challenge for those of us who seek to paint ‘landscapes’ and whose customers tend to purchase paintings of views which they recognise or which mean something to them. 

As a would-be artist I have practised. I have drawn the human figure, painted still-life, designed wallpaper, and have produced ‘pure’ abstract work just as I have worked in acrylic, watercolour, oil pen+ink and have painted on all sorts of surfaces. 

I find that I will occasionally produce something that is not grounded in and does not seek to present an image of a specific place, which therefore falls into the ‘abstract’ box, but more often my inspiration does come from a particular site with its’ mood and atmosphere, and so IS a ‘landscape’ of that place, but it is more and more unusual for me to seek to ‘copy’ reality – I will still move those trees to improve my view, and I often seek to paint something which is evocative of the sensations I experienced while out there – which I think puts my work into the category of ‘expressionist landscapes’.

But, frankly – who cares?

If I enjoy painting it, and you enjoy looking at it, the rest is just packaging.

November 2025