The Homes Paintings Make
Recently, two collectors wrote to me in response to my newsletter. Their emails arrived only a few days apart, but together they made me think differently about what happens to paintings once they leave the studio.
One was from Sara, who bought a painting called Across the Severn II more than a decade ago. Since then, she told me, the painting has travelled with her through several homes.
"The painting has lived with me in a brand new modern flat in Monmouth, an ancient listed cottage in Lincolnshire and now a Victorian semi in Newark-on-Trent."
What touched me most was not simply that she had kept the painting for so long, but that it had become part of the identity of each home.
"The painting has always influenced my decorating choices - not only in the room it hangs in but throughout the house."
Across the Severn in Sara’s new home
The second email was from Ali, who had only recently bought a painting from Clifton Contemporary.
She described seeing the painting in the gallery window and knowing immediately that it belonged in her life.
"This one just went straight into my heart, bypassed my thinking mind that would say 'no, you can't afford it'..."
A few weeks later she sent me a photograph of the painting surrounded by plants, books and the everyday life of her home.
Springtime in Ali’s plant room
Later she wrote:
"Sat enjoying it now, listening to the rain..."
Such a simple sentence, yet it seemed to capture something important. Paintings rarely remain separate from the lives around them. They become part of daily rituals, passing moments, changing seasons and familiar rooms.
Reading these emails, I realised that although the stories were very different, they were really describing the same thing.
One painting had been part of a home for more than ten years.
The other had only recently arrived.
Yet both had already become woven into the fabric of home.
Home itself is never fixed. We move house. We redecorate. Furniture comes and goes. Families grow and change. Yet certain things travel with us through these transitions, gathering memories along the way.
Paintings seem particularly able to do this. Unlike many objects, they don't simply occupy space. We return to them repeatedly. We notice them in changing light. We glance at them while making coffee, reading a book, or listening to rain on the window. Over time they become familiar companions.
My own home functions as an extension of the studio, and paintings are constantly arriving and leaving. Newly finished works often spend time on my walls before they find their way to galleries or collectors. I like living with them for a while, seeing how they respond to different rooms, different weather, and different times of day.
Unlike some artists, I have very few of my own paintings that I've kept permanently. Many were lost during my move back from Spain, while others have long since found homes elsewhere. What I do treasure are paintings made by friends. These carry memories of people, places and conversations, and remind me that art often becomes part of our lives in ways we could never predict.
In a later email, Ali mentioned a thought she had heard from the writer and teacher Rupert Spira: that when we are deeply moved by art, music or poetry, we are brought into contact with the state from which it was created.
Whether or not that is exactly true, I recognise something in the idea.
The paintings that stay with us often become more than images.
They become places we return to.
Perhaps that is what we are really choosing when we bring a painting into our lives. Not simply something to hang on a wall, but something that will accompany us through changing homes, changing circumstances and changing versions of ourselves.
Homes evolve. We evolve.
Yet certain things remain.
A painting can become one of those constants: a source of continuity, a companion through time, and sometimes a kind of home in itself.
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