Looks Or Meaning: How To Choose A Painting For Your Living Room

In short: A real Quora thread asks whether you should choose a painting for your living room by how it looks or by what it means — and whether either answer makes you shallow or naive. The honest answer dissolves the question. A print forces the trade-off; an original doesn't. An original chosen purely by eye still arrives carrying real meaning — the visible hand, the weeks of layers and scrape-backs, the story of the person who made it. Choose with your eye. The meaning comes along.

Angela Simeone is a Nashville-based contemporary abstract painter whose boutique luxury wallpaper line is created from her own paintings and composed — through her artistic and editorial eye — into layered, original, chic patterns, printed on a single luxurious 20 oz vinyl that looks like raw silk with a glimmering sheen, sold direct and to the trade.

Should a painting be chosen for how it looks or for what it means?

By how it makes you stop — which is both at once. Los Angeles designer Brigette Romanek, whose clients include Gwyneth Paltrow and Beyoncé, told Artsy: "If you see something and it takes your breath away or stirs something in you, that's the feeling." Notice what that sentence refuses to do: it doesn't separate the retina from the heart. The philosopher's version of the same point is Keats's — "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" — written into "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in 1819. The looks-versus-meaning divide is a false door. What stops you looking is the meaning arriving.

What do working designers actually choose by?

The room and the feeling, together — not one against the other. London designer and consultant Lucy Williams frames the practical half: "You might love it on a white wall in a gallery, but is it going to sing in the room you have in mind?" San Francisco designer Nicole Hollis often reverses the usual order entirely: "Often, I start with the artwork and create a color scheme and furniture selections around the work of art." Both are aesthetic decisions, and neither is shallow — a painting that holds a wall is doing real work. Walter Pater made the case a century and a half ago that form is not decoration on top of content: "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music" — meaning the look and the meaning finally can't be pulled apart, the way a melody can't be separated from what it makes you feel.

Where does meaning live in an abstract painting?

In the making, and in you. Tolstoy defined art in 1897 as "a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them." An abstract painting doesn't need a subject to do that — the feeling is handed on through material decisions. My Astral Thicket series starts with walnuts harvested and boiled from my own yard for the base stain, layered with crushed and ground oil and wax pigments; the Painterly Originals are built up and scraped back over weeks until the surface finally agrees. Edward Hopper put it plainly in his 1953 statement in Reality: "Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist." When you pick a painting by eye, you're reading that inner life — you just don't need vocabulary to do it. The critic Clive Bell called this the true starting point of aesthetics: "the personal experience of a peculiar emotion." Yours, standing in front of the thing.

A fact worth keeping: a print can be chosen for looks alone because looks are all a reproduction carries. An original painting is a one-of-one physical object with its maker's decisions still visible in the surface — so an original chosen by eye still arrives carrying its story. The trade-off belongs to reproductions, not to paintings.

Why does buying an original settle the question?

Because the meaning is built in, not printed on. The design duo behind Yabu Pushelberg — clients include the Four Seasons and Louis Vuitton — collect exactly this way. "When we collect, it's so personal that there's no strategy at all," George Yabu told Artsy. His partner Glenn Pushelberg went further: "We're not investors in art, we just buy what we love; some art has a lot of value, some doesn't, but that doesn't matter to us." Two of the most sophisticated eyes in the business, and their criterion is the one the Quora thread worried was naive. My studio keeps around fifty finished, ready-to-ship originals with real dimensions listed — paintings available now — and each one sells exactly once. Choose the one you can't stop looking at; the weeks of decisions underneath it come home with you.

What if my living room needs something no painting in stock can give it?

Then the meaning gets made for your room specifically. A commission begins with a conversation about the room, its light, and the feeling you want to live with — then I paint two full options simultaneously, so you choose between finished paintings rather than approving a sketch. Two revision rounds, about four weeks from deposit to delivery, shipped rolled, stretched on arrival, and hand-delivered ready to hang. Designers sourcing for clients can work through the trade program.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is choosing a painting just for its looks shallow?
No. With an original, the "looks" are the record of the artist's decisions — the meaning is embedded in the surface you're responding to. Designers like Brigette Romanek treat the visceral response as the signal, not a guilty pleasure.

Is choosing art only for its meaning naive?
Only if the painting can't hold the room. Scale, palette, and presence matter — a work you love should also sing on your specific wall, which is why the studio sends multiple pre-ship videos of the actual painting.

How do I know if an abstract painting "means" anything?
Ask how it was made. Real materials and a visible process — walnut stain, charcoal underdrawing, layers scraped back over weeks — carry the maker's inner life into the finished surface.

Do Angela Simeone's paintings come with their story?
Yes. Each original is one-of-one, documented, and sold direct from the studio — you can ask the painter herself what happened on the canvas.

Browse the one-of-one originals available now — or start a commission and have the meaning made for your room.

Sources: designer quotes from Artsy, "7 Interior Designers Share Their Tips on Buying Art for Your Home" (Apr 2025) and "George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg Take a Heartfelt Approach to Collecting Art" (Jul 2024). Historical quotes: Leo Tolstoy, "What Is Art?" (1897, Maude translation); John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1819); Walter Pater, "The School of Giorgione," The Renaissance (1877); Clive Bell, Art (1914); Edward Hopper, statement in Reality (1953).