Caring for an Original Painting You Just Acquired

Congratulations, first of all. Bringing an original into your home is a real thing, and I never take it lightly that someone chose to live with something I made.

Now let me take the anxiety out of it, because caring for a painting is genuinely simple and there is much less to it than people fear.

The first week

Let it acclimate before you hang it. If it traveled in a truck in July, give it a day indoors, still wrapped, so it can come to room temperature gradually rather than all at once.

Then unwrap it and look at it in the room at a few different hours before you commit to a spot. Morning and late afternoon are very different, and where a piece looks its best is often not where you first assumed.

Hanging it properly

Use hardware rated for well above the actual weight, and anchor into a stud when you can. Drywall anchors are fine for smaller work, but a large piece deserves a stud and two points of contact so it stays level.

Standard height is center of the piece at about 57 to 60 inches from the floor, which is average eye level. Break that rule freely over furniture, where the better guide is six to eight inches of breathing room above the back of a sofa or a console.

Cleaning, which is barely a thing

A dry, soft, clean brush or a very soft dry cloth, used gently, a couple of times a year. That is the entire routine.

Never use water. Never use any household cleaner, and please never use a product with alcohol or ammonia in it. And no oils or so called restorers from a hardware store, which do real damage and are difficult to reverse.

On a heavily textured surface, a soft brush is much better than a cloth, since a cloth catches and pills on the ridges.

The two things never to do

Do not tighten the stretcher keys yourself if the canvas seems slack. In our dry air that is usually the air talking, and tightening then can crack the paint when humidity returns.

And do not store a painting flat, or in a garage, or in an attic. Vertical, indoors, in a climate you would be comfortable sitting in yourself. An Arizona garage in July is one of the harshest environments a painting can be put in.

A small thing that matters more than you would guess

Keep the paperwork. The certificate of authenticity, the invoice, any provenance record and any photos of it in your home. Put them somewhere you will find them again in twenty years.

That record is what makes a piece straightforward to insure, to pass on, or to place later. It takes five minutes now and it is very hard to reconstruct later.

And if anything ever happens

Tell me. If a piece of mine is ever damaged, or something looks wrong, or you are moving and want to know how to transport it, please just ask. That is not a warranty conversation, it is simply how I want to look after the people who own my work.

You can always reach me through the studio, and the Collector's Circle is where new work appears first if you ever want to add to what you have.

Warmly,

Dani