Art in my Family Room

We started out a little bit haphazardly with respect to picking and hanging art in our family room (the room with the TV and computer). Slowly, however, we developed a marine theme which I think is a great idea. Pick an art theme for any one room and then use that theme to pick the art you will have in that room.

Listed below are the pieces of art in our family room in the order they were acquired.

The poster below was acquired by my wife before we started dating but is nice enough that we have had it up on a wall in our first apartment, then in our first house, and now in the house we are currently in. I suspect that eventually we'll acquire a marine piece that will replace this one, but for now this is it.

In 1996 I travelled to the UK to hook up with a bunch of friends I had met on the internet, one of whom is a painter. Early one morning, because we hadn't gone to sleep the previous night, the five of us went for a walk and at one point he (the painter) ran ahead a little and took a photograph. I thought little of it at the time until a year or so later I received a package in the mail from him containing this painting. I leave it to you to discern which of the four people is me. This also may eventually be replaced by something nautical or marine.

This (as per wikipedia) is likely the most common Alex Colville painting. In the early 2000s we went to the National Gallery in Ottawa and saw a Colville exhibition, in the shop afterwards we saw this and loved it. This painting is in the most prominent spot in the room and was the start of our marine theme.

For Christmas in the mid 2000s I purchased for my father a set of two craft ships which he really enjoyed building. It is the act of building that appealed to him, the final product he was somewhat less interested in, so he gave it to us. It is in a corner of the room high on a shelf so that the kids don't touch it.

In 2009 we traveled to PEI with another family and rented an amazing house together for two weeks. While there we came across the Anne Gallant gallery and looked in and saw many paintings we liked. In her gallery she has originals for a high price, large prints for a more reasonable price and then smaller prints that are inexpensive. The large prints and the small ones are numbered, so there is only a limited run of each that she makes. With this one we really decided that a marine theme was what we would use in this room.

We send our kids to a summer camp for which we also volunteer and raise funds. At a recent event we won the print below.

Do you have a room that has lots of art in it? Why not do a similar hub? Do you have a room that has themed art, even better - hub it!