There is no more common response, after we have been living with our furniture for a few years, than a feeling of intense (though normally very privately-held) boredom. However intriguing these pieces might have been at the start, and however accomplished they remain in theory, we tend to end up in the unfortunate position of knowing most of their nuances, of having seen them from every angle and of being left to smile wanly at their all-to-familiar presence. Without meaning to be disloyal, our eyes develop a tendency to drift; we can fall powerfully for pieces we glimpse only momentarily on the social media or in a store window, and which seem to harbour all the charm and depths of the unknown.
Haunted by an impression of mesmerising but unattainable mystery, we become irritable and ungrateful towards the familiar pieces that are in our care and company. It is understandable enough that we should seek novelty from time-to-time; our characteristic error is to believe that this must mean seeking out new pieces. Restless, we miss out on a critically redemptive idea: that the furniture we have been with for so long, perhaps for many years, is in fact capable of showing up fresh and new. And, paradoxically, because they are in our presence every day we often make assumptions about them which is what dissuades us from continuing to bring to bear on them the kind of searching intelligence we would naturally apply to some new piece we are bringing into the home. It is our assumptions that deals our curiosity a fatal blow – and encourages us to feel listless and dissatisfied where we should more fairly remain inquisitive and enchanted.
One counter to this settled ingratitude lies in certain works of art, which contain coded pleas for us to start noticing the intricacy and beauty of overlooked aspects of the everyday. Artists of genius have over the centuries used their talents to say what amounts to, in effect, ‘Notice the astonishing sunlight as it hits the top of the trees, the delicacy of the water rippling by the shore, the solemnity of the fog hugging the landscape at dusk…’ They challenge us to notice afresh what we jadedly think we have already seen. We can think in this context of the work of Edouard Manet, who in 1880, looked afresh at a bunch of asparagus – that is, looked at a spring vegetable with the appreciative sensitivity of a Martian or a young child newly landed on the planet.
Where we might have been prepared to recognise only dull white stalks, the artist observed and then reproduced vigour, colour and individuality, recasting this humble foodstuff as a sacramental object through which we might recover faith in life more broadly. In the spirit of Manet, we might turn to consider our furniture as if they too were an alien wondrous objects worthy of sustained appreciation and study.
We might begin by looking again with fresh eyes. Examining the finish – does it need cleaning and waxing to once again bring that wonderful grain and patina to the fore? We could with newfound curiosity consider how the furniture is dressed with complimentary décor or soft furnishings. Perhaps we could reorganise the room so that the pieces can be viewed from different angles and different light. We might even contemplate changing the purpose the piece of furniture was used to bring a fresh new view on its purpose and function within the home.
We could put aside the veil of partial knowledge which has prevented us from seeing those pieces and see them properly as if for the very first time. And we might do this not once, but as a regular exercise to remind us of the ongoing mystery of those pieces we could only ever think of as familiar by error and hubris. With such techniques in mind, we stand to recognise something at once alarming and deeply relieving; that we don’t necessarily need to go out and find a new furniture in order to recover a sense of excitement in the home. We don’t need to look for new furniture, we need new eyes to look afresh at the familiar world around us.
