Good Morning.
I am in the process of hanging art in my new home, clearly the most pleasant aspect of moving. Putting away towels, canned goods, and clothing is just plain tedious. Everything about moving is just plain tedious except hanging the art.
I have collected a lot of art over the past several decades with my first acquisition a watercolor of a barn after a heavy snow. It was done by a close family friend and well-known New England artist, and eventually I got another of her paintings, a barn in more clement weather. I like barns. Barns are cool and anything that lives in a barn is cool.
I also have a lithograph of Beethoven done by my son and a batik of a seagull done by an art teacher. I have still lifes of fruit in my kitchen and a copy of a New Yorker magazine cover that appeared at the time I was born. I have an etching of a fox and a pastel portrait of my mother. I have a painting of a row of beautiful old townhouses that were torn down in the interest of urban renewal. Right.
I have posters, including one with the caption Expose Yourself to the Arts. It's a photograph of a woman on pointe in ballet slippers and a trench coat and she is flashing the statue of David that stands in a downtown park in my city. When the statue, a full-sized replica of the original in Italy, was donated by an inspired benefactor, there was a fair amount of uproar about it. Some got all huffy about the sculpture ever seeing the light of day, and over a period of two years while David rested in a warehouse, the city council debated week in and week out about how to situate him in the park. Should he face motorists coming across the bridge or the traffic when it turned the corner? What view of David would the ladies in the nearby senior apartment prefer to brighten their day? This, I feel, would be a case for renting on the lower floors rather than higher up where all you'd see would be the top of David's head.
I am selling my two huge acrylics by a local artist because I don't have the wall space and could use some extra cash. One is an interesting interpretation of a large, slightly hassled-looking woman with two small children in a grocery cart, and the other is the pair of female nudes mentioned in my very first blog. It takes a certain attitude to hang a gigantic painting of nudes in one's home, but the repairmen who stop by have apparently been amused - and it brings me now to what I've hung in my new office - also unexpected and up for discussion. It's a portrait, three feet by six, of the cowboys from The Magnificent Seven, properly attired, mind you, but a bit in your face nonetheless. It was given to me for my sixtieth birthday by two good friends and I've always thought their selection was not only because The Magnificent Seven is my all-time favorite western but also because they'd clearly prefer to gaze upon some good-looking dudes on horseback than a couple of fair maidens in the buff. Me too.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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