Art, everywhere

I want my children to grow up surrounded by art: by beautiful things, things without purpose, things to inspire and please the senses.

This is one of my motivations for collecting physical books. Physical books are cumbersome and awkward and require vast amounts of space; it seems stupid to dedicate an entire room to their existence, when their contents can be transferred to a single hard-drive.

But you can’t walk around a hard-drive or smell an Amazon server room; I want my children to rifle through the pages of books at random, to marvel at their covers and see their family and friends doing the same.

We moved fairly recently, and I’ve been trying to fill the house with art, as quickly as possible, while the children are still young. But art is expensive. After discussion with my art consultant, ChatGPT, I decided to try sourcing second-hand frames and printing my landscape photos:

One charity shop expedition, one Amazon basket of framer’s tape and picture wire, one batch of printed photos and a total of £30 later, and I have a personal stash of art to decorate the house with. My kids seem to like it (and so do I).