Your Dream Art Collection

Imagine you're an art collector and can have all of your favorite paintings in the world for your collection. Price doesn't matter. Availability and location are insignificant. Who cares if the artist is living or dead, famous or unknown, modern or realistic. What art pieces would you have on your walls? What inspires you as an artist? What major works would you have? Or what guilty pleasures would be in your collection? Do you love realist work, but would have Autumn Rhythm Number 30 by Pollock in your collection? Are you an atheist, but an iconic religious work of medieval Christianity would hang on your wall? Think like a passionate collector. Decide what those are. However, there is one restriction: You can have no more than two works of any artist.

The main idea is to find works that you like. It makes you take a closer look at your favorite artists work and discover just what it is about a piece that moves you and to begin to see things from a collector's viewpoint instead of simply from an artist's.

For fun, find those works, and either print them out and collect them in a file folder, or (what I did) put them all into a folder on your hard drive and make a pdf for easy reference. You can also put them on a wall in your studio for inspiration. Like all art collections, this will change over time as artists produce new work and as you discover pieces you never knew existed. Also, over time you may begin to lose favor of some of them. You can continually add and subtract from your collection.

You can collect anything you want. The image above is a collage of some of the pieces in my dream art collection. You can see it is a little eclectic, but that's all right. I like it, and it represents who I am.

It's a fun exercise, and I'd love to know what you learned from it.

© All above images are copyrighted to their respective artists.