Modern Abstract Art

Legendary designer William Morris once said that you shouldn’t have anything in your home that you neither know to be useful nor believe to be beautiful.  Beautiful, of course, is in the eye of the beholder – and beautiful is useful, too.  Without beauty, no home would be anything more than a house.  The problem with houses – and homes – is that more than one person tends to live in them, or at least visit enough that their opinion (their belief in the beautiful) counts.  How does one decorate such a space?  One way to do it is with abstract wall art.

Abstract wall art elevates the function of living rooms (by which we mean any room in a house in which a person lives, rather than just doing stuff) to real “home” rooms, by leaving an imprint of personality, an individual statement, on their blank spaces.  The great beauty (or use) of abstract wall art is that it can mean many things to many people:  which means, if you get a bit of abstract wall art in the house, that everyone who lives there will have their own interpretation of it.  If everyone is interpreting a house’s abstract wall art on their own terms, the rooms in which that abstract wall art appears will feel deeply personal to everyone who uses them.

A lot of representational art, popular and indeed attractive though it may be, alienates people who live with or visit it, because its obvious nature (an apple is an apple no matter how it is painted) discourages personal interpretation.  Abstract wall art demands that everyone who views it has a personal relationship with it.  Abstract wall art, after all, is often just colours or shapes arranged on canvas – a person can’t relate to it at all unless he or she dredges up some individual experience or slant by which to view it.  And so the room in which the abstract wall art sits becomes coloured by personal association, which makes it feel like home.

The online availability of original abstract wall art has made some pieces utterly unique – which removes the “everyone’s got one” cliché associated with a lot of representational art people use to decorate their homes.  This also performs the rather neat trick of making abstract wall art both utterly “for the masses” – if everyone can interpret it no-one feels left out – and completely exclusive.  The homeowner opting for abstract wall art gets the best of both worlds:  a piece that can make everyone feel at home, which no-one else in the world will have.