Bedroom Painting…

My new acquisition – Nada, Oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm., 2016 by Freya Purdue makes it onto a wall and looks quite lovely there in the front bedroom that gets the best of the morning light. It sets me thinking of a quote so I go off and find it…

“Several years ago, Nicholas Wilder and I were discussing John McLaughlin’s paintings. He said that McLaughlin’s paintings were ‘bedroom paintings’. ‘Bedroom paintings’ I asked, ‘what does that mean?’ Nick answered that often people would buy a painting by McLaughlin to hang in their living room. After a while, they would move the painting to their bedroom where they could live with it more intimately.  I said ‘My ambition in life is to be a bedroom painter’.
Two Bedrooms in San Francisco, David Reed.
from David Reed, Cantz Verlag, 1995

In this picture Reed’s painting hangs above the bed, albeit in a gallery (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2015) and on the wall another sits next to a Mary Heilmann…in a show entitled Two by Two where – intriguingly – they were ‘twinned’ in the displays.