Art as Hospitality
There have been many other reasons people have chosen to give art to others. Giving artwork to your home as a gift to your every guest is a beautiful reason.
A couple came to me asking me if I could do a four-painting set for a home they’d just built. Their interior decorator had suggested that one wall would be best filled with original paintings. They asked if I could do four paintings themed around the Bay Area where they live: a blue crab, a heron, a pelican, and an oyster.
We don't just give art to fill the wall. Art helps us enjoy the life we share with family, friends, and even strangers we welcome into our homes.
Hans Rookmaaker suggests that there is a reason we decorate our homes with paraphernalia on theme with our contexts. For example, people who live in our region decorate their walls with piers, sunsets, boats, fishing scenes, and the beach. Rookmaaker claims that this helps us experience more deeply the reality of the place where we live, and it offers us a way to enjoy these things, to give thanks for them. One additional benefit of this is how, when we purchase and hang art on the wall, when we practice hospitality, we offer people a moment to share our own enjoyment over something. A loving reuniting of the broken human community.
A woman we know well has artwork all over the walls of her home. Many of them depict periods in her family’s life. In the foyer hangs a portrait of her late husband. When I first visited her home, I went around and asked about any many paintings as I saw. She was more than happy to give me the history and the context for each piece, not to mention the fact that she shared how each piece made her feel. I felt valued, trusted, and in return I gave value and trust to her life and home.
Hospitality is becoming a lost art, particularly where subdivisions and privacy fences are taking over. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be a part of a revolution to bring people into our homes and, whether through art we’ve collected or a meal we enjoy, to share with them the joy we experience and the gratitude we feel at what God has given us? No doubt this would be a powerful counter to the pain and alienation we so often feel, the loneliness and meaninglessness. Art and hospitality give us a powerful balm against these evils.
