Painter Carmen Herrera, from the New York Times 12/19/2009
Art is such a commitment. You must love what you put on your walls, and in the more traditional approach to good taste, your “decor” must somehow synthesize, harmonize, or…match. We don’t go so far as to endorse matching in our house, but purchasing art is still intimidating. Scale and color and texture and tone must be stuck into the context of a domestic living room, and suddenly aesthetic preferences are found at odds with reality. Money only adds to the conundrum of What To Put on That Wall.
We have avoided the whole mess by sticking to small art works, modest little old drawings and prints, which we love dearly but which don’t quite make a statement. They instead impart the slightly sentimental (albeit un-saccharine) feel of a curio shop. We have been tempted to fill vacant wall space with objects, such as a portion of an old tin gas station sign we once found (and, alas, left on the road side) featuring a dinosaur. That somehow lets us off the hook of having to find a large piece and stand by the art and the artist.
Another option would be to create something ourselves. There is enough talent in our house to fool people into thinking we meant it, and I have even considered commissioning hundreds of small pieces from our three-year-old and stitching them together by hand. But there is something in me that thinks it is gauche to decorate my own canvas, like placing large family portraits above the mantel.
Then tonight I read in the New York Times about Carmen Herrera, a 94-year-old painter in NYC who has just begun to get recognition for her supremely restrained graphic geometric paintings. Her sense of proportion is lovely, and I immediately thought: Oh! I could copy that for our wall. Which I Shall Not Do.
But it did make me think about what makes art, and particularly this kind of modern art, original. What makes Herrera’s triangles so amazing, and why is it less amazing if I pull out the painter’s tape and measure her angles and duplicate them on my wall? I would be decorating, obviously, whereas she is painting, but is there something essentially different between what she has created and I could copy? I think there is, but I don’t really know why. I am drawn to geometric and color studies from Kandinsky and Mondrian through to Herrera, and there is an impulse to try my hand at their work, but I don’t.
Why are their circles, squares, and triangles superior?
