“Why do people buy art” is a question which has many answers and possibly a different one for each purchaser. Some people buy art as it brings back happy memories, while others purchase as an investment or simply because they like it and so allows it to be a topic of conversation when family and friends visit their home!
Even as a photographer of many landscape scenes, I still feel that a photograph cannot give you a feeling of actually being there within the image as a painting can. The North Yorkshire based artist Andrea Mosey’s paintings make you feel as though you can actually feel the rain on your face and the wind moulding your waterproof to the shape of your body.
Beauty in the bleak by Andrea Mosey www.andreamosey.com
The great artists Turner and Constable reportedly each spent 1000s of hours watching and analysing clouds and cloud formations and this can be recognised when you look at some of their masterpieces.
As someone who uses and advises how photography, mindfulness and nature can help with your mental health and wellbeing, I feel this is an area where photography comes into it’s own. For instance while out walking you may see some interesting lichen on a drystone wall, or feel the textured bark of a tree, the smell of a flower or the sound of a trickling stream and you take a picture yourself or purchase a mounted or canvas print then looking at it in the future will allow your memory to take you back to that moment and the joy and calmness it gave you at the time.
While you’re taking the picture you are concentrating on the composition of the image and this action in itself helps bring your stress levels down as you are “in the moment” of concentrating wholeheartedly on the picture in the viewfinder. If you sit or lay in a field listening to the steady flow of a river or stream then a picture of a babbling brook will return you to the serenity of that moment in the field.
Being tactile with a wood carving or a sculpture, again may bring back many pleasant thoughts and feelings or an appreciation of the time and effort it’s taken the artist to create the piece. How often do we see toys at fayres and have to touch them because it takes us back to our childhood and playtime memories and for a moment we escape from the stresses and worries of the present day, such is the power of our emotional thought process.
So why do people purchase art? Simply, because they do and if it brings pleasure then what more do we need to know?