Ed Ruscha Standard Oil

Trevor Young is a quintessentially American painter. He makes no bones about his affection for the trappings of car culture, life on the road and 1960s West Coast art. His main subject is modernism’s footprint on the outposts of Americana, places typified by harsh artificial light and hard shadows on concrete. For Young, despite the contemporary art world’s preferences for irony, disjunction and tongue-in-cheek intellectual gamesmanship, painting is at its best when it attempts to offer an unpretentious accounting of where and how we live our day-to-day lives. The celebrations of urban sprawl offered by artists like Ed Ruscha, who famously took no-nonsense aerial photographs of 34 Los Angeles parking lots in 1967 and created sleek, stripped-down paintings of Standard Oil stations, are an obvious point of reference in Young’s work. But Young’s choices seem more personal than Ruscha’s and his technique is certainly more painterly. His images of gas stations are uneasy amalgamations, cobbled together from his memories of road trips, photographs and pure invention and rendered with a sense of atmosphere and drama seemingly at odds with his use of hard lines and simple geometric shapes. Young activates every square inch of his canvases, blocking in large passages of negative space with skeins of scruffy countervailing strokes. He is not a fussy painter, nor is he out to prove his mastery to an audience. Like Edward Hopper, Young tends to eschew a lot of paint’s seductive properties, preferring to create hard edges and large, gently undulating planes of subdued color. He draws the viewer into an unpopulated, uncluttered world with a clear horizon line, but one that is also filled with hiccups, discontinuities and compromises. For Young, the cold comfort offered by outposts of convenience like gas stations, airports, cheap hotel rooms is not so easily dismissed. Young shares the strange buoyant optimism of his hero, Jonathan Richman. Spending time with Young’s paintings, one can’t help but feel the echoes of that thrill.

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.