Copper Coverup

Lydia Viscardi is best known for her representational mixed media collages that combine highly detailed realistic painted and drawn imagery with flat shapes cut out from patterned papers and fabrics. Her work demonstrates a sustained interest in exploring the complex relationship between humans and animals. She is also fascinated with neuroscience and memory, particularly childhood memory, and how it informs adult identity. Viscardi mines her own childhood and past for potent experiences that she depicts with both humor and an uneasiness that creates psychological tension. This irony imbues her two-dimensional mixed media Childworks and Recollections series and her assemblage sculpture. Viscardi teaches Studio Art at Quinnipiac University and Housatonic Community College and is a museum educator at the Housatonic Museum of Art and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. Selected exhibitions include the Drawing Center, ODETTA, Sideshow Gallery, Active Space, Brooklyn Fireproof and The Heckscher Museum of Art in New York, Center for Visual Arts in New Jersey and The Barnum Museum and the Housatonic Museum of Art in Connecticut. The complexity of memory, particularly the potency of earliest experiences and how these inform adult identity, is a primary focus of Lydia Viscardi's mixed media work. Childhood is innocent and benign, yet often fraught with fear and anxiety. The physiology of memory lies at the center of our identity, determining who we are and who we become. Additionally, she is quite interested in the complex relationship between humans and animals and our connection to our instinctive animal nature. Depending on cultural heritage and convictions, certain animals are exalted, revered, protected, feared, reviled, or loved as family members while others are thought of as commodities to be used for food, man’s bidding for labor or scientific research.

Painting is an art form that has spanned innumerable cultures, with artists using the medium to tell stories, explore and communicate ideas and express themselves. To bring abstract, landscape and still-life paintings into your home is to celebrate and share in the long tradition of this discipline.

When we look at paintings, particularly those that originated in the past, we learn about history, other cultures and countries of the world. Like every other work of art, paintings — whether they are contemporary creations or works that were made during the 19th century — can often help us clearly see and understand the world around us in a meaningful and interesting way.

Cave walls were the canvases for what were arguably the world’s first landscape paintings, which depict natural scenery through art. Portrait paintings and drawings, which, along with sculpture, were how someone’s appearance was recorded prior to the advent of photography, are at least as old as Ancient Egypt. In the Netherlands, landscapes were a major theme for painters as early as the 1500s. Later, artists in Greece, Rome and elsewhere created vast wall paintings to decorate stately homes, churches and tombs. Today, creating a wall of art is a wonderful way to enhance your space, showcase beautiful pieces and tie an interior design together.

No matter your preference, whether you favor Post-Impressionist paintings, animal paintings, Surrealism, Pop art or another movement or specific period, arranging art on a blank wall allows you to evoke emotions in a room while also showing off your tastes and interests. A symmetrical wall arrangement may comprise a grid of four to six pieces or, for an odd number of works, a horizontal row. Asymmetrical arrangements, which may be small clusters of art or large, salon-style gallery walls, have a more collected and eclectic feel. Download the 1stDibs app, which includes a handy “View on Wall” feature that allows you to see how a particular artwork will look on a particular wall, and read about how to arrange wall art. And if you’re searching for the perfect palette for your interior design project, what better place to turn than to the art world’s masters of color?

On 1stDibs, you’ll find an expansive collection of paintings and other fine art for your home or office. Browse abstract paintings, portrait paintings, paintings by popular artists and more today.