Most of us can remember the first picture we truly loved. Perhaps it was a poster on a bedroom wall, a painting in a school corridor, or something glimpsed on a family trip to a gallery that we didn't quite understand but couldn't stop looking at. If you went back to that picture now, you might still love it. But you would almost certainly love it differently. The picture hasn't changed. You have.
That simple fact is one of the quiet joys of living with art, and it is something we think about a great deal at Aleph. People often talk about choosing art as if it were a single decision, made once and then settled. In our experience it is closer to a long conversation, and the person on your side of it keeps growing up.
Young eyes look for recognition
When we are young, we tend to want art that reflects us back. We are drawn to images that seem to say who we are, or who we would like to be: bold colour, strong statements, pictures that match a mood or a belief or a piece of music we can't stop playing. There is nothing shallow about this. Working out who you are is serious business, and art is one of the ways people do it.
At that stage a painting can feel like a flag. We hang it to show where we stand. We want it to be noticed, and we want it to agree with us.
Later, we start to look for company
Something shifts as the years go by. Life fills up with work, relationships, homes, children, losses and second chances. Many people find that the art they want around them changes from something that announces to something that keeps them company. They want a picture they can live alongside for years, one that will still have something to say on an ordinary Tuesday morning as well as on a special occasion.
This is often when people discover the pleasure of slower work: a landscape that rewards a second and third look, a still life that seems to hold its breath, an abstract painting whose colour shifts with the light through the day. The appeal is no longer instant recognition. It is the sense that the work has depths you haven't reached yet.
Experience changes what we can see
There is a reason a painting of an empty room, a winter field or an old face can mean so much more to someone in their sixties than to someone in their twenties. We bring our own lives to every picture we look at. Once you have known real grief, a painting about absence reads differently. Once you have watched your own children grow, a portrait of a young person carries a tenderness you may not have noticed before. Once you have walked the same stretch of countryside for thirty years, a landscape stops being a view and becomes a kind of memory.
None of this is in the paint itself. It is the meeting between the work and the person standing in front of it, and that meeting deepens as we accumulate experience. In that sense, older eyes are not tired eyes. They are often far richer ones.
Patience becomes a pleasure
As people get older, many become more patient with art that doesn't give itself away immediately. A younger viewer might walk past a quiet, muted canvas looking for something louder. Someone with more years behind them is often happy to stand still, let the eye settle and wait for the picture to open up.
This is one of the great gifts of age where art is concerned. We stop needing to be impressed and start wanting to be moved, or calmed, or gently surprised.
The same painting, different decades
One of the best reasons to buy an original work you love, rather than chasing whatever is fashionable, is that it will travel through your life with you. A painting bought in your thirties may be the one you notice afresh in your fifties, when you finally see the patch of colour in the corner that the artist clearly spent hours over. A drawing given as a wedding present may mean one thing in the first year of a marriage and something much deeper twenty-five years later.
A good work of art doesn't wear out. Instead, it keeps pace with you. That is why we often suggest choosing with your heart rather than your head, and then giving the work time. You are not only buying it for the person you are today. You are buying it for every version of yourself that will live with it.
Looking back with kindness
It is worth being gentle with the art we loved when we were younger. They did their job. They helped us work out what we cared about. Many people find that, as they get older, they come back to earlier loves with a fresh fondness, seeing in them something of their younger selves.
Taste doesn't simply improve over time, as if there were a ladder to climb. It widens. We gain the ability to enjoy more kinds of art, not fewer. The person who once only wanted bright abstraction may find room in later life for a quiet watercolour, and the lover of traditional landscape may suddenly find a bold contemporary canvas speaking to them in a way it never did before.
Art for every stage of life
We have written before about why humanity has always needed art. Part of the answer, we think, is that art meets us where we are. It offers recognition when we are young, company as we settle, and depth as we grow older. Few things in a home can do all three.
If you would like to test this for yourself, the best way is simply to come and look. Our next exhibition, PAINTINGS feat. MEADOW 100 by Mark Stopforth, opens with a private view on Friday 6 November, 6 to 8pm, and runs until Saturday 28 November. Take your time and notice which works hold your attention. You may find yourself drawn to something you would have walked straight past ten years ago.
The gallery is always open on Fridays and Saturdays, and at other times too, though it is worth ringing ahead to check. However old you are, and whatever you have loved before, there is a picture waiting that will grow up alongside you.