Stuff Never Sleeps - Part II

 

In 2014, I spent two weeks in Lima, Peru, attending the Conference of the Parties to the Climate Change Convention.

My flight home left at midnight. To make the best use of the rest of that day, the other members of the Ontario delegation and I took a walking tour of Lima. Among many other things, we saw these painstaking excavations by archeologists seeking to answer the question, "how many times, and in what colours, has this building been painted?"

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More than a week after our painters departed, the place still has that fresh paint smell. Our furniture, at least most of it, is back more or less where it was. But the artwork, the artwork's still a hanging job in progress.

Anyone who has visited my home knows there's a lot of art on the walls. It's a mix of stuff I bought abroad as souvenirs to remember museum shows or to support local artists, or bought at the Toronto Art Show to support local artists, or took from my parents' or Bruce's parents' collections after they were gone, or were gifts, or were odd little mass-produced pieces that struck my fancy. Or were just junk.

Our artwork hung randomly around the house, though some pieces were placed deliberately to cover holes left by the previous owner, or to use nails hammered into the wall by the previous owner. 

The cheerful painting crew we hired took care of all the unwanted holes and hardware. We now have, in the truest meaning of the phrase, a blank slate on all our walls.

Given the opportunity to take a long hard look at all the stuff we had hanging around, the first thing I did was put six pictures in the trash, and ten more in the crawlspace (aka the waiting room for the trash). 

Aside from the two large mosaics, a mandala and a portrait of Molly-the-Dog, by Sudarshan Deshmukh, most of the one-of-a-kind artwork pieces are still waiting to be hung. Getting the mosaics up originally took three separate trips to Canadian Tire, so we told the painters to leave the hardware where it was. We did switch their locations. Now Molly watches television in the living room, and Bruce has a halo at every meal.

Thanks for reading!

Karen