Doesn’t that rectangle of early-morning winter sunlight look like a framed picture itself?
When things are hard, I get a sudden urge to decorate the walls. Recently, mourning a friend, I spent hours scrolling Swedish eBay for prints, tapping now and again to favourite a few listings, sure I’d feel better once I chanced upon the perfect piece for the empty space above the bed. I soon became restless and disillusioned by the whole thing, closing the app and accepting defeat, knowing I’d probably repeat the pointless exercise the next day if it meant delaying my grief that bit longer. I should say, it takes far less brutal circumstances to activate this coping mechanism. Any slight twinge of rootlessness, and I’ll become convinced that the answer lies, or hangs, on the walls.
The thing is, I know very little about art. I am only just beginning to feel like I have an idea of what I like, and how to identify why. I know I like colour. I know I like naive styles (a term I only recently learned through my artist husband). I like pieces in which there is a sense of something happening: a couple dancing, or birds perched on branches, drawn in loving detail. I like to feel as though there is a story that begins and ends at some point outside of what the picture is showing. I seem to enjoy a floral still-life arrangement more than the average person, something I’m sure would astound my GCSE art teacher.
This process of choosing art for our home has been, in many ways, a process of learning who I am. As with any self-discovery journey, the road has been littered with errors. I’ve bought pastoral scenes that were probably painted by children. The aforementioned print of a dancing couple appears to have been cropped from a magazine (I love it regardless). A large oil painting of flowers and fruit hangs in an ornate frame in our living room; as fond as I am of it, it provokes the wrong kind of emotional response. My husband absolutely hates it but, because he’s very sweet, he hates that he hates it, and feels like he’s crushing my soul with this adverse opinion. Our walls, then, have been the arena for a tug of war, a meeting of minds at different points of artistic understanding.
We’re getting some of it right, though. In the living room (divisive oil painting aside), we’ve arranged a gallery wall comprising pieces found many moons and moves ago in West-London car-boot sales or thrifted from the second-hand shop I beg to be taken to every time we’re in town. In a nook by the porch door is a print from Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers collection. I’m far from the only person who feels emotionally stirred by this particular piece; I assume it’s something about the colours, the balance of playfulness and sadness, the retrospective knowledge of Van Gogh’s tragic life in every stroke. If you’ll let me be a bit ridiculous for a minute, I can’t help but relate to some of what Van Gogh might have been feeling when he painted Sunflowers. He’d been living in Paris but, finding city life overwhelming and isolating, moved to Arles in Southern France where a slower pace inspired the burst of creativity that led to him producing his most well-loved work. Today, Van Gogh is one of history’s most cherished artists, but at that time in his life he was a struggling, insecure, aspiring creative just like so many of us. (Full disclosure, I got this information from falling into a research hole at the time of writing this newsletter. Like I said, I really do know very little about art.)
I wrote the bulk of my first short story collection after such a relocation. Despite (or, perhaps, due to) being native to London, I never cared about getting the most out of the city, and was excited to embark on a radical lifestyle change, mostly because I was desperately done with my toxic workplace and wanted to feel less reliant on a salary to get by. It wasn’t so much this new, very different location that inspired me creatively, although it did, than the level of financial independence and time that came with it. Maybe Van Gogh experienced some of that same freedom in Arles.
You’ll have seen Sunflowers in the news recently, its protective glass cover splattered with tomato soup. Paintings all over Europe have being targeted this year as part of a unified campaign to highlight the severity of the climate crisis in a way that is hard to ignore, whichever way your opinion lands on the uncomfortable matter of destroying (or at least temporarily maiming) art on a planet itself being destroyed. Galleries have never been politically neutral spaces. The internet tells me that the concept of hanging paintings on walls became prominent in 18th century France, with the Louvre soon populated by stolen work and the spoils of French colonial occupation across Europe and the African continent. Here in Sweden, the newly appointed right-wing government has just imposed entry fees in the country’s state-owned art museums, in a move that will restrict who has access to this form of cultural enrichment and entertainment. The very definition of art is constantly challenged by late-capitalist technological advances like AI and NFTs (if you’re interested, artist and YouTuber Cat Graffam offers insightful, slightly terrifying but nonetheless amusing breakdowns of both on their channel).
So, we hang art on the walls of our homes. As renters, we fret over deposits, intent to not leave marks of our presence behind once we’ve left. I’ve previously written about how, before moving into our first home as buyers, I fantasised about driving nails into the walls without a single thought given to upsetting a landlord or neighbour. This is what we (or, rather, the one of us with upper-body strength) do on a November evening. Our focus is the stairwell, where we’ve decided to exclusively hang black-and-white photographs or prints, of which we already have a handful: a photo of some municipal building my husband took as a student; photos of my dad strumming his guitar in the 60s; photos of 17-year-old me in a dress bought for pennies somewhere in Portobello, taken by my talented school friend in her Streatham flatshare, a house lost to moves that will nonetheless stay in my memory forever. Another thing I’ve realised I like: when art holds open a window to moments of time that once felt as real as this one.
The Bookshelf
In this section of Home Comforts, I share a reading recommendation for a book or piece of writing that touches on themes of home.
We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson
I won’t pretend to know enough about gothic fiction or Shirley Jackson to offer an in-depth review of this 1962 novel, the last Jackson published before her death, aged 48. But I was struck by narrator Merricat’s determination to protect the home she shares with sister Constance at all costs, through rituals as strange as they are futile, even if it means destroying what is most important to her. Their home is one that has seen many things: music, afternoon tea, family dramas, murder. It’s a well-fed house, its cellar lined with the preserves and labour of generations of women gone by. This was maybe my favourite thing about this masterfully written but unnerving story: the delicious descriptions of food, save for that one fateful meal, of course.
Do you have a recommendation I might like? If so, I’d love to hear from you!
My short story collection, Tools For Surviving A Storm, is out now.
‘In a transporting, original collection, Nadia Henderson examines the lines between nature and the human world through stories set in landscapes both brutal and beautiful.’