I Like To Have A Picture In My Room

I Like To Have A Picture In My Room

I like to have a picture in my room. Why? Without one, my room feels bare however much furniture I may have; and I will tell you the part that a true picture plays, and that nothing else can play, in my room.

Pictures have played many roles. They have been altar-pieces, fetished, idols, the courtly decorations of palaces, historical records, vain fancies, and vain fables. My dwelling room has too much going on in it for such extravagan luxuries. In the morning it is a sanctuary, in the daytime a factory, in the evning a place of festivity, and through the night a place of rest. I want a window in it, I want a telephone, a radio and a television set. All these are contats and doors inthe the outer world, But besides these, and more than all these, I want a focal point, something alive and silent. A bunch of flowers on the window sill? Yes, but they will wither. A cat curled up on the hearth? Yes, but it will go away and prowl upon the rooftops.

A picture will always be there. It will make no sound. It willnot expect ne to look at it while I am tapping at the typewriterm while I am cleaning the floor with the vacuum cleaner. It will wait. It will always be there. If it is a true picture I shall never grow tired of it. It will have the quality of tirelessness. I shall see someting fresh in it when I glance at it tomorrow. Howver familiar I have grown with it, I shall not come to the end of its friendship. It does not matter in what style it is painted. When I was a child I had a reproduction of a Dutch picture - a girl in a red jacket, reading a book in a shaded interior. I watched her read for long peaceful hours.

I now have a Mondrian on my wall - merely a contrast of horizontal against vertical lines crossing white spaces, and one poised yellow square. I have known busy politicians who cared nothing for art, come and write their speeches in the room where the Mondrian lives. That small canvas expresses the still order behind the turmoil.

For that is the quality that the picture for my room must have. In the ebb and flow of the outer world, I must have a place where the harmony of space is giving its verdict. I like harmony to be expressed in colour. For colour is one of the surest means of expressing joy - the joy that resides in a happy home. If the colours be welded scientifically, they can glow - even make luminosity in the even light of an interior; and added to this light my picture must have recesses within itself, a flower bud or a distinct prospect, expressing the secret within all that is true. For it must certainly be a picture of truth, not photographic nor realistic, the surfaces of appearances - but measure and rhythm and scale that are its inner essence.

So the picture for today's dwelling-house must be an anchor for security, must be a lamp for delight, must be a well of peace, and when it has attained all that - and we are asking much of it - we shall ask something more, we shall ask it tobe a ladder - not one of those realistic ladders made of wood, that reach as far as the ceiling, but one of those upheld in places of stones, that have no limit, not een the sky; and upon which translucent thought may travel up and far way and also down and back to the home hearthfire.

That is what I want of a picture in my home. Is it the same as yours?

 

(Published in the Christian Science Monitor 1954, and  Unknown Colour; Paintings, Letters, Writings by Winifred Nicholson, ed. Andrew Nicholson, Faber and Faber, London 1987).