Buying art
/For those who are regular readers of this blog, I apologize for missing last Wednesday and Friday, but we were on the road for a quick getaway. I’ll spare you the details of the whole trip — driving through Alabama and Mississippi not on the interstates is mind-numbing — but I will tell you we ended up in New Orleans.
Besides the food and cocktails, my main reason for going was to buy art, if I found any I liked. For that purpose we headed to Royal Street, which is one street over from Bourbon Street. (We are at that stage in our lives where we don’t need anything, so our general rule for purchases while traveling is to buy only jewelry, art, or gin.)
Actually I had two goals, the second being to go to Goorin Bros hat store and find a summer hat that didn’t make me look like Kid Rock when my hair is down. That was easily accomplished. Then we got serious about the galleries.
Here’s the point of this post: Buy art. Don’t buy reproductions. Buy real art, done by artists. If possible, buy art from artists.
And buy what you like. We skipped half the galleries on Royal Street because the art didn’t appeal to us, but you do you. Buy that acrylic painting of an alligator playing a saxophone under a New Orleans streetlamp if it makes your soul happy!
Our house is full of art, overfull in fact: I don’t have a place to hang my two new acquisitions. (Yet.) Of the stuff hanging on our walls, there are maybe two pieces that are posters or prints, i.e., not original art.
We have pieces by people who make their living making art, like this piece by sculptor Kevin Box:
We have pieces by art students from the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program (where I worked for nearly 30 summers):
We have pieces by “amateur” or outsider artists:
We have pieces from colleagues, friends, our son and other relatives, street artists, and me. We have sculptures and ceramics and fabric art. The majority of my coffee mugs are artist-made. I keep meaning to put it all into a database so we can keep track of it all, but I keep not doing that. Cras melior est.
So what did I buy in New Orleans?
In my defense, I had budgeted a largish sum, so when we stumbled on a lithograph by a noted artist in the first gallery we entered, I was prepared to buy it on the spot. However, I just put it at the top of the list and we kept moving down the street.
Then I saw this:
It’s handmade paper/pulp, pressed and embossed and painted. It smacks of petroglyphs and cave art and postmodern thingies, and it’s beautiful. It’s by a German artist, Thomas Hamann, who it turns out is much into the hippie woo.
Here’s a hippie woo story about this piece: I had assumed the scrawl in the lower left corner was the artist’s signature. It was only as I was paying for it that I learned the artist’s name, and that the scrawl was the title: IKARUS I, i.e., Icarus. Of course I was bound to love this work.
After it’s delivered this week, I may have to revisit the work in more detail.
Oh, and I bought the first piece too.
You’re right. It is, in fact, a Picasso, a lithograph: Woman and Clown. It resonated with the Old Man in me. It is the first piece I’ve ever bought by a world-famous artist, at least one of Picasso’s stature.
And I bought it because I liked it, not because it was by the most famous artist of the 20th century. It was in my budgeted price range — never mind that I had already spent that amount down the street — and shipping was free. What’s not to like?
Buy art. Buy art you like. Make it so that when someone visits you, the art around them tells them who you are.
