There are two schools of thought on choosing great art for your home. Artists and gallery owners tend to promote the idea that if you love a piece, buy it. You will always find a place for it.
Interior designers, on the other hand, look at art as a way to finish or inspire a room. They tune into the art’s scale and colors to make sure they work with the room and its furnishings. To them, even the most generic OTC (Over The Couch) art can work, if the palette and size are right.
That leaves those of us who love art, want a beautiful pulled-together home and don’t have unlimited funds scratching our heads. Do you buy what you love and not care if it fits in? Or go to the opposite extreme? I’m optimistic enough to believe you can have art that cuts both ways — if you’re careful. So, when I heard that interior designer Angela Neel, of Winter Park, Fla.
, was giving a “How to Marry Art and Interior Design” talk at a local art gallery, I signed up. “Art is what gives a home its personality,” she said as she launched her informal talk. “It tells the story of those who live there.
Without art, a home is just a house.” She was singing from my hymnal now. Indeed, as far back as the Lascaux Caves in France, circa 17,000 BCE, home dwellers have used their walls to display what mattered to them.
Although homes have come a long way since prehistoric cave times — let’s pause to give thanks for flush toilets, central heating and microwaves — that need for artistic .