1 min read
At first this commission looked ordinary to me: cover a heating panel. A brief, plain and clear. But I worked out long ago that there are no unimportant places in a home.
Especially if that place is the first thing you see when you come in. When you open the door and the wall looks at you before the people do. It greets you, sets the tone, reflects the people who live in the space.
The hallway was tiny, almost comically small. There was no room for error. We decided to go not for decor but for a state. An island, conifers. Milk-white, enveloping fog: the kind that swallows the noise of the city, the conversations and other people’s eyes.
The painting really is huge — 190 × 170 centimetres. The whole wall, like a window onto somewhere easier to breathe. And at the bottom, a blot. Alive, not accidental at all, like the trace of a hand, like a sign:
People live here who are drawn to making things.
Not necessarily to painting, but to life, definitely.
The blot as permission to be imperfect, unpolished. Real.
When the work went up, the wall stopped being a wall. The heating panel disappeared and the whole space opened out.
The hallway stopped being storage for shoes and keys and became a threshold between outside and inside, the edge between noise and quiet.
This is what I love about commissions like this. At first glance they are “about nothing”, but in fact they are about the most important thing.
About the state a home begins from.
large painting · wall-sized painting · Commissioned painting · painting with fir trees · functional painting