Buying Contemporary Art for Your Home

For many homeowners their ultimate dream is to buy contemporary art to hang on the walls of their beloved home. Buying contemporary art can enhance your home as well as add a feeling of accomplishment and culture. However, for many of people the concept of buying art can be a little intimidating.

Buying contemporary art doesn’t need to be a daunting experience. It should be a fun and exciting experience, where you have the opportunity to view and purchase a wide range of contemporary art by both well-established and new emerging artists. What a lot of people find intimidating about buying art is the concept of what is ‘good’ art and what is ‘bad’ are. No one wants to be accused of investing in worthless art.

The important thing to remember when you’re looking at buying contemporary art is that you’re buying the piece for yourself and your home. We generally buy art that we see as an extension or representation of ourselves, our ideals and what’s important in our lives. When buying contemporary art you should always choose art that makes you feel good and will enhance or add to the atmosphere of your home.

The best way you can ensure you’ll buy contemporary art for your home that is both complementary of your home and enduring in value is to first spend some time looking at different artists and pieces of art. Select a few pieces that you really like and see if you can identify some commonalities in the pieces. It may be something obvious like the use of colours, scenes or textures. You may notice that you are drawn to a particular medium of art, like acrylic paintings or glass art.

By looking at a range of art you will start to develop your ‘eye’ for art and your particular tastes and interests. However, like fashion, your tastes in buying contemporary art may change in another one or two months. So when you’re looking to make a larger art investment ensure that the piece you choose is well suited to your core taste and is not extremely over-the-top or dramatically different to your usual art preference – you may later come to regret the purchase.

You don’t necessarily need to buy from a well-established artist. You also don’t need to be any kind of ‘talent scout’ looking for the next big thing when looking to buy from new and emerging artists. The reason many people buy from emerging artists is the opportunity to own a quality piece of art to hang in their home at a fraction of the cost of established artist counterparts. If you’re purely looking to decorate your home with original contemporary art, it is well worth your time doing some research on the Internet and attending local art fairs.

If you’re looking to buy contemporary art as an investment, you will find it helpful to visit art galleries and enlist the help of a professional art advisor. Art advisors work with you to get an idea of your tastes and lifestyle to help build your own art vision and create a sound investment in your art collection.

Buying contemporary art should in no way be an intimidating experience. Remember that your art collection should be a representation of yourself and your own particular tastes in art, don’t let others tell you what is good or bad art.

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History Of Painting

In Western cultures oil painting and watercolor painting are the best known media, with rich and complex traditions in style and subject matter. In the East, ink and color ink historical predominated the choice of media with equally rich and complex traditions.

Aesthetics and theory of painting :
Aesthetics tries to be the "science of beauty" and it was an important issue for such 18th and 19th century philosophers as Kant or Hegel. Classical philosophers like Plato and Aristotle also theorized about art and painting in particular; Plato disregarded painters (as well as sculptors) in his philosophical system; he maintained that painting cannot depict the truth—it is a copy of reality (a shadow of the world of ideas) and is nothing but a craft, similar to shoemaking or iron casting. Leonardo Da Vinci, on the contrary, said that "Pittura est cousa mentale" (painting is an intellectual thing). Kant distinguished between Beauty and the Sublime, in terms that clearly gave priority to the former. Although he did not refer particularly to painting, this concept was taken up by painters such as Turner and Caspar David Friedrich.

Hegel recognized the failure of attaining a universal concept of beauty and in his aesthetic essay wrote that Painting is one of the three "romantic" arts, along with Poetry and Music for its symbolic, highly intellectual purpose. Painters who have written theoretical works on painting include Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Kandinsky in his essay maintains that painting has a spiritual value, and he attaches primary colors to essential feelings or concepts, something that Goethe and other writers had already tried to do.

Iconography has also something to say about painting. The creator of this discipline, Erwin Panofsky, tries to analyze visual symbols in their cultural, religious, social and philosophical depth to attain a better comprehension of mankind's symbolic activity.

Beauty, however, a concept to which painting is essentially linked, cannot be defined as an objective matter, purpose or idea. Much aesthetics and theory of art is connected with painting.

In 1890, the Parisian painter Maurice Denis famously asserted: "Remember that a painting – before being a warhorse, a naked woman or some story or other – is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order." Thus, many twentieth century developments in painting, such as Cubism, were reflections on the means of painting rather than on the external world, nature, which had previously been its core subject.

Julian Bell (1908-37), a painter himself, examines in his book What is Painting? the historical development of the notion that paintings can express feelings and ideas:

"Let us be brutal: expression is a joke. Your painting expresses – for you; but it does not communicate to me. You had something in mind, something you wanted to ‘bring out'; but looking at what you have done, I have no certainty that I know what it was…."

Painting media :
Different types of paint are usually identified by the medium that the pigment is suspended or embedded in, which determines the general working characteristics of the paint, such as viscosity, miscibility, solubility, drying time, etc.

Examples include: Acrylic, Encaustic (wax) , Fresco, Gouache, Ink, Oil, Heat-set oils, Water miscible oil paints, Pastel, including dry pastels, oil pastels, and pastel pencils, Spray paint (Graffiti), Tempera, Watercolor

Painting styles :
'Style' is used in two senses: It can refer to the distinctive visual elements, techniques and methods that typify an individual artist's work. It can also refer to the movement or school that an artist is associated with. This can stem from an actual group that the artist was consciously involved with or it can be a category in which art historians have placed the painter. The word 'style' in the latter sense has fallen out of favor in academic discussions about contemporary painting, though it continues to be used in popular contexts.

Abstract, Abstract expressionism, Post-Abstract Expressionism, Art Brut, Art Deco, Baroque, CoBrA, Color Field, Constructivism, Contemporary Art, Combined Realism, Cubism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Figuration Libre,
Folk, Graffiti, Hard-edge, Impressionism, Lyrical Abstraction, Mannerism, Minimalism, Modernism, Naïve art, eo-classicism, Op art, Orientalism, Orphism, Outsider, Painterly, Photorealism, Pluralism, Pointillism, Pop art,
Postmodernism, Post-painterly Abstraction, Primitive, Pseudo realism, Realism, Recto version, Representational Art, Romanticism, Romantic realism, Socialist realism, Stuckism, Surrealism, Tachism.

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The Still Life Paintings of RB McGrath

www.blurb.com Visit: www.rbmcgrathfineart.com Still Life Paintings from the Studio of RB McGrath in Jacksonville, Arkansas, a Newfoundlander abroad. Seven of the paintings shown in this video are on exhibit in the Jacksonville gallery. The remaining fourteen are in private and corporate collections throughout the US and Canada. This series of Still Life Paintings was created between 1999 and 2006. All works are oil on canvas paintings. Background Music Alone at The Crossroads. Brian Carter – Piano. Please enjoy.

Unique Wedding Gift — a Photo to Canvas Painting

According to professional wedding planners, wedding photography is one of the most significant expenses for a newlywed couple. Converting one of those photos to canvas will bring endless joy to the happy newlyweds for years to come, and will surely be “one of a kind.”

Countless angles and settings are used to capture the magnificence of the day. Photographers and videographers are almost intrusive with their lenses and recorders as they work endlessly to preserve the wedding experience in images. As a result, floods of images are glanced over and then placed in a book or on a cd and forgotten about for years.

In the past, images that were “blown up” to be utilized for displaying were available as posters that lacked a professional element. Today’s technology overcomes those rudimentary images by producing crisp, clean, colorful images that resemble works of art worthy of a position in a prominent area in the home.

The process is highly affordable and most images can be converted into a canvas print and shipped to the buyer in 3-4 business days. Imagine the look on the new couples’ faces when they return from their honeymoon and see a canvas print of them from their wedding day as your gift to them.

Photos to canvas service providers have the ability to custom frame your selection. Canvas prints can also be wrapped around a wooden frame which results in the look of a work of art from a gallery. Search the web to locate a photo to canvas provider, and make a fantastic memory last forever for that special couple.