Start Living With Art: How Original Paintings Transform Houses Into Homes
There's a question that comes up quietly in the lives of people who've worked hard to create beautiful living spaces. You've made the right furniture choices, selected considered paint colours, arranged everything thoughtfully. The room looks right. But does it feel like yours?
This isn't about decoration. It's about the difference between a well-appointed space and a home that holds genuine meaning.
The Research We Didn't Expect
Recent studies from the University of Vienna and Trinity College Dublin have revealed something art galleries have long suspected but lacked the data to prove. A 2025 meta-analysis published in The Journal of Positive Psychology examined 38 studies covering 6,805 participants and found that simply viewing art improves what psychologists call "eudemonic wellbeing", the aspects of life satisfaction connected to meaning and personal growth.
More remarkably, these benefits weren't limited to museums. They occurred in homes, hospitals, and everyday environments. The World Health Organization's 2019 review of over 900 publications on arts and health led them to formally recommend integrating creative approaches into routine care.
What this research confirms is something collectors have understood intuitively: living with art isn't decorative indulgence. It's a legitimate contributor to daily wellbeing.
Why Original Work Matters
The question naturally arises: does it need to be original? Can't a high-quality print achieve the same effect?
The difference lies in presence. An original painting occupies space differently. Take Gemma Lynch-Memory's work. Her surfaces are built from thousands of individual marks in thick impasto oil paint, layered over months. Light doesn't just reflect off these paintings, it moves across them, revealing different qualities depending on time of day, weather, your position in the room.
You can't replicate that textural depth in reproduction. The physical reality of the paint matters. It's why people stand longer in front of originals in galleries, why they return to the same work repeatedly in their homes. There's information in those surfaces that engages us in ways we don't fully understand but certainly feel.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Value
Let's address what makes many people hesitate when considering original contemporary art: cost.
Here's where the conversation becomes interesting. Most things we purchase for our homes depreciate the moment we own them. Furniture, electronics, homewares, all lose value over time. Art is one of the few purchases that typically moves in the opposite direction.
According to RBC Wealth Management's 2023 Art & Finance Report, 90% of wealth managers now believe art should be included in wealth management offerings, up from 53% in 2014. This isn't speculation, it's recognition of demonstrated performance.
But here's the thing: viewing art purely as financial investment misses the point. The real value proposition is that you get to live with something genuinely beautiful while it appreciates. You're not parking money in a storage unit hoping for returns in a decade. You're enriching your daily environment with something that contributes to wellbeing whilst holding, and often increasing, monetary value.
Lynch-Memory's career demonstrates this clearly. With over $2 million in sales across 36 solo exhibitions spanning nearly thirty years, works from her earlier periods now command significantly higher prices than their original purchase values. Collectors who bought in the 1990s or 2000s aren't just enjoying beautiful work in their homes, they're holding appreciating assets.
**How to Begin
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The art market can feel impenetrable from the outside. There's specialised language, unspoken rules, price opacity. For first-time buyers, it's genuinely intimidating.
Some practical realities worth knowing:
Buy what stops you. The research on art and wellbeing shows benefits come from engagement with work that resonates personally. If you're acquiring something because you think it's a smart investment but you don't actually like looking at it, you've missed the point entirely. The majority of collectors describe their significant purchases as emotional rather than calculated decisions. Something stopped them, held their attention, wouldn't let them leave without it.
Understand what you're seeing. Take Lynch-Memory's paintings. Her practice involves months of layering, sanding, and meticulous mark-making. Each horizon line represents the meeting place between earth and heaven, grounding and transcendence. This isn't decoration, it's phenomenological investigation of consciousness and place. Knowing this changes how you experience the work daily in your home.
Consider scale seriously. One of the most common mistakes first-time buyers make is purchasing work that's too small for the intended space. Contemporary interiors can handle bold, large-scale painting. Don't be afraid of work that makes a genuine statement. A significant piece can anchor an entire room, with everything else responding to it rather than competing with it.
Think in years, not months. The Sotheby's Mei Moses research indicates that artworks held for at least ten years are most likely to be sold at profit. But that's actually a feature, not a bug. You want to be living with this work for years. You want it to become part of your daily visual environment, something you notice differently depending on season, light, mood.
The Tasmanian Context
Tasmania has developed a particular reputation for thoughtful collecting. Perhaps it's the island's relationship with landscape, the way light moves across the Huon Valley or reflects off the Derwent. There's an understanding here that art isn't separate from daily life but integrated into it.
The TAG Art Gallery operates on what they call a continuous exhibition model rather than formal openings. There's always significant new work to discover, and you can spend time with pieces without the pressure of an event. For people who find traditional gallery environments intimidating, this approach makes genuine engagement easier.
For interstate and international collectors, detailed photography and consultation make remote purchasing viable, though there remains no substitute for seeing heavily textured work in person.
What This Actually Means
Here's the honest reality: most people spend more money on furniture that will be worth a fraction of its purchase price in five years than they'd consider spending on original art that will likely appreciate over the same period whilst contributing to their daily wellbeing.
It's not about unlimited budgets. Payment plans exist. Tasmania's Art Collect program offers interest-free terms on works under $8,500 specifically to make collecting accessible to people building collections over time.
The real question isn't financial. It's whether you're ready to acknowledge that the spaces you live in deserve more than just functional completion. Whether you've earned the right to reward yourself with something genuinely beautiful that makes your home unmistakably yours.
Because here's what the research keeps confirming: art isn't luxury. It's how we create environments that support not just our physical comfort but our psychological wellbeing. It's how we mark that we've built something worth living in, not just staying in.
The homes that feel most complete, most genuinely inhabited, are the ones where original art has been allowed to do its work. Not as decoration, but as the element that finally makes everything else make sense.
Gemma Lynch-Memory's latest works are available at The TAG Art Gallery, 60 Murray Street, Hobart, or online at www.thetagartgallery.com