Where to purchase affordable wall art on long island? (New York: sale, apartments)
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
You live on LONG ISLAND, for heaven's sake! NYC is right over there, and it's full of artists, and schools for artists: the best artists in the nation. Why not go for something with a little intellectual content, instead of something vapid and mass-market?
If you're going to pay crazy New York taxes, why not avail yourself of some of the crazy-wonderful opportunities which surround you there?
Yes, you can go into TJ Maxx, or Ross, and buy 'wall art' that has been discounted since it was marked out of stock at HomeDepot or BED, BATH, & VAPID, or wherever.... That will get 'something' onto your wall, real cheap. It'll be new and shiny, and made on an assembly line somewhere. And your walls will have exactly the same stuff on them that someone in a mass-produced house in some suburb of Kansas City or Fargo will have. New York is full of stuff not readily available in the Heartland. It's right at your fingertips. Why not grab some of it?
You can buy canvases directly from art students in New York: people who don't have galleries representing them, yet. Our first few apartments, my Decorator decorated using canvases he dug out of the garbage, at the art school (We were all just penniless students ourselves, back then, and DH & I were buying derelict slum apartment buildings, & 'gentrifying' them.). Funny, but every single one of those painters (the ones still alive, anyway) now has a following. I suppose those canvases are worth a bit of money, now.
Some of those trash bin finds are good enough that our Decorator was able to use them in our current house. That's because they have 'intellectual content', rather than being just vapid pseudo-abstract blobs of paint, keyed to "today's colors". The house is a 'composition' in travertine, glass, & stainless. It's a 'brutalist' house, designed with the expectation of its housing a collection of Abstract Expressionist paintings. Our little collection of freebies, and a collection of Mississippi Impressionist paintings we added later, fit right in. Our Decorator did not have to go out and "buy something to put on the walls". This is noteworthy, because these artworks survived an otherwise total change in our decor. We'd moved from the Gulf Coast to the Pacific Coast, and were reinventing ourselves (again).
Those freebie paintings (unframed, but on stretchers) had hung on our white 'penthouse' walls in our apartment buildings. They looked great in our first 'real' house (a sprawling late-50s, which made the regional decor mags, once it had been 'updated'). They looked good in our first builder nightmare McMansion out in the burbs. They looked good in its slightly more refined 'custom' successor. They still looked fine, when we built our 'forever house': a Creole-style walled compound, with twelve-foot ceilings, Corinthian Order interior architecture, and neo-Rothschildian decor (After all, Henri Samuel did work modern pieces into many otherwise traditional Rothschild interiors).
And now, they are resplendent in this house. The Bleached Maple floors and lacquered ceilings really make them sing. In their schlep between Mississippi and Oregon, our Decorator sent them in for 'conservation'. The stretchers were straightened & reinforced, blemishes corrected...
We're building, again. The new house is as fine, French, and pointy-roofed as I'd ever dared dream. We've sold this house to someone whose recent ancestors owned several of America's grand old department stores (they, like most of our Nation's mercantile royalty, had to sell the stores, to pay inheritance taxes). The crates containing what survives of his Great-Grandparents' Mid-century Modern Art collections have been 'acclimating' in our living spaces. They're coming out of the crates, now. Their Decorator is hanging the new Owners' collection, as ours is putting our own collection into their crates.
The two collections compare favorably, even though ours cost little, and theirs cost a lot. Their Decorator wants to buy a few of our pieces. "Don't do it, Mama", says our Daughter. "Nope.", say our Sons. "Those paintings have been a constant in our lives. We've lived in so many different places. We've BEEN so many different people. But when those paintings go up, we know we're HOME."
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
