Hanging Pictures
What is it about hanging pictures that I find so consequential?
Maybe it’s choosing the pictures – evoking memories, affecting the mood of a room, creating a story with what’s on the wall, defining space with narrative and image. Every picture or photo evokes a person, a place, a feeling, a memory.
Then there is the task of hanging something on the wall so that it looks good. You pound the little, easily bent nail into the hard plaster wall in just the right spot for the hanger, otherwise the picture gets too high or too low; and if you have an arrangement of pictures, the hangers have to be placed just right so that the group looks orderly. If you get the hanger in the wrong place, even by a fraction of an inch, then you have to pull it out — now you have a hole in the wall.
It all seems so high stakes while I’m doing it.