Living room walls... they are there during your private conversations, they accompany your tears and laughter, they let you stare at them for hours on end. And this past year and a half, we have all been staring at our walls for longer than usual. So, how do you want to decorate this flat, silent friend? With something neutral yet meaningful? Something that you won't get bored with, but that won't distract from the latest episode of whatever tv show you're watching? Will it offend your grandmother? Will it scare the kids? And above all else, should your art match your furniture? Can you be that unbearably gauche?
These are the question I'm asking myself these days, as 8 months after we moved into our new house, the living room walls are still bare. Being an illustrator, these are not run-of-the-mill questions. The stakes are high!
I will be creating the art myself, because my budget is small and my kids use too many colours for the decor.
Illustrators differ from fine artists in their level of practicality. And so I began by buying the frames: two (deeply discounted) matching wooden frames from Michael's. The colour of the wood is the same as that of the coffee table, and satisfies my artistic fussiness.
I let the frames sit in their plastic shopping bag for a couple months while I thought things over. Lately, I've been into gardening and we have a Camellia bush in our backyard. It has such beautiful flowers and I spent days sketching them. This resulted in one semi interesting sketch, and one day as I scrolled through my images, it hit me: it would be perfect for the living room! Non-offensive, natural, relevant.
Perfect, except for one thing: the flowers were pink and my living room is grey, blue and gold. I can introduce a background colour of warm green. But pink would be too much. The question thus becomes: can I make the pink flowers yellow. Do Camellias come in yellow?
Yes, they do. They are called Jury's Yellow. They are a very pale yellow, so there will be some artistic interpretation. Do they grow in BC? Are the petal shapes the same as the one in my yard? These questions will remain unanswered. One time in art school, I took an information design class and I almost failed a project because I wouldn't stop researching. Lesson learned: stop researching at some point and just paint it. That is coming up next. For now, here's my bare wall, my camellia bush, and my sketch. I also prepped some paper.
