Proper home needed

Art, like home, is filled with personal connections and myriad emotions.
By LISA BOONE
LOS ANGELES TIMES
LOS ANGELES -- Listening to Michelle Isenberg talk about the art in her home is like listening to a parent talk about a beloved child. She welcomes the challenge, because art is filled with possibility. It seemingly can do no wrong.
But a Melanie Pullen photograph that Isenberg bought this year did go awfully wrong when she brought it home and hung it in her living room. The color in the large-scale crime scene just didn't work.
"The green killed off everything in the room," Isenberg says of the space, already occupied with works by Charles Fine, Hans Christian-Schink and Roy McMakin. So she moved the Pullen photo to her bedroom. "I thought the green would be too big for the bedroom, but it slipped right in," she says. "It wasn't the same at all. Perhaps it was an intuitive thing. It just was meant to be there."
Art, like home, is filled with personal connections and myriad emotions. It can reflect who we are, what we want to be and how we choose to live. But how do we know that artwork will make the transition from gallery to home successfully? And how can we make sure its treatment at home -- the placement, the lighting, the relationship to other pieces -- is working?
What to do
The first step, experts say, is to treat art as more than decoration. Among its grander purposes is to promote dialogue. With naked pride, Isenberg tells of a recent visit from her grandson, who referred to a Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler piece of found art -- a Tonka truck, filled with fragments of various writings -- as "'Fahrenheit 451' in three dimension." She discusses the connection between "The Grapes of Wrath" and a quartet of black-and-white photographs by Horace Bristol in her kitchen. She cites a recent dinner party, when guests discussed the political implications of angry birds depicted in a Laurie Hogan painting over the mantel.
"People will see life differently through the art they own or the art they purchase," says Isenberg, a professional art adviser for public, private and corporate collections for nearly 20 years.
Interior designer Molly Luetkemeyer, one of Isenberg's former students in a "Living With Art" class at the University of California, Los Angeles Extension, warns clients that art seen in a gallery will not look the same at home.
"It's more about understanding how the art is going to function in the context of the space," she says. "I ask my clients how they want their space to feel, not look."
Craig Krull, who has a photo-based gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, agrees.
"The art acts off the wall, acts off each other," he says. "Contextual things happen when you put art in a space. Things often have to get moved around because they react to each other inside the space."
Frame and place
That leads to questions about how a piece should be framed, in which room it should be placed, how it should be lighted, even how high it should be hung.
Isenberg likes to move artwork in her home regularly. "Put it anywhere you want and keep changing it, because you will see things differently," she says.
Adds Luetkemeyer: "Very rarely does something just not work. It just doesn't work where you put it."
The ideal spots often are unexpected. "Bathrooms are a great place for art," says Isenberg, who is not afraid of moisture's effect on art.
"She is fearless," Luetkemeyer says with a laugh. She prefers the powder room, which generally has less moisture. "It's a contained space, away from every other living space," she says. "You can completely control the lighting, and in a space that small, you can get face to face with the art."
Height is a different matter. Speak with 10 experts and you might get 10 different formulas for hanging art. Isenberg positions paintings so that the center is 60 inches above the floor. "I go over to friends' homes and lower their art and straighten it," she says, smiling.
Krull says it's difficult to apply definitive rules to something as subjective as art. "You can have fun with height," he says. "It gives things a quirky look." Variables such as space limitations have to be taken into account, he says, but many galleries allow collectors to take an artwork home "on memo" to see if it works in a particular space.
"When you buy a piece of art, you have to think about framing and lighting it," says Luetkemeyer, who advises clients to calculate the cost of both before bringing any piece home.
Lighting
For lighting, Luetkemeyer suggests ceiling cans that can be used for directional lighting.
"Works on paper are very sensitive to light, so you have to study your space and understand how the light works in the room," she says. If the art is on a stand, light it from below. If you want to hang art in a space that gets a lot of sun, then you have to finds ways of manipulating the light, such as adding drapes.
Famous names adorn the walls of Isenberg's home, but some of the artists are quite young. A painting by her granddaughter hangs in a bathroom window, sharing space with the famous Alberto Korda photograph of Che Guevara and a Jenny Holzer plaque. Isenberg's office is filled with her own art, her father's teddy bear and works from a Winnipeg, Canada-based artist collective, the Royal Art Lodge.