Search for paintings with meaning and you will find long lists explaining that a tree stands for growth, an eagle stands for strength and a lotus stands for enlightenment. It reads well. It is also almost entirely made up after the fact, and it is not what makes a painting mean anything to the person who owns it.
Assigned symbolism is a label somebody attached to a picture. Meaning is what happens when a picture is attached to your own life. The two are not the same thing, and only one of them survives being hung on a wall for ten years.
What actually gives a painting meaning
Ask people about a painting they would not part with and the answers come back in the same few shapes.
- It is a real place they know. The lake they went to every August. The road into their grandparents' farm. Recognition does the work that symbolism only claims to.
- It marks a stretch of time. This is the one people underestimate. A canvas that took twenty hours across a difficult winter carries that winter in it. The subject barely matters.
- Somebody specific made it. A painting your mother finished is not the same object as an identical one from a shop, and everyone knows it without being told.
- It replaced something. Plenty of people start painting after a loss, a retirement, an illness. The finished picture is evidence that the evenings went somewhere.
Notice that none of those are properties of the image. They are properties of the relationship between the image and a person, which is why a list of symbols can never generate one.
The one piece of art history worth borrowing
Van Gogh painted his sunflowers in Arles in the late summer of 1888, and he was not making a statement about vitality or joy. He was decorating a bedroom. Gauguin was coming to stay, Van Gogh wanted the room to look welcoming, and he wrote to his brother about it in those terms.
The meaning we now attach to those paintings arrived later, from everything that happened afterwards. That is the ordinary way it works. The painting comes first and the meaning accumulates around it. You cannot start at the other end, and a kit sold to you on the strength of what a symbol supposedly represents is starting at the other end.
We have written more about that particular set of paintings in our piece on sunflowers as a subject.
If you are choosing for yourself
Pick the picture you keep looking back at, not the one with the best story attached. Sit with the two or three you have narrowed it down to for a day before deciding, because the one you are still thinking about the next morning is the one that will hold up over twenty hours of painting.
Be honest about subject matter as well. If landscapes leave you cold, a landscape will not become meaningful because someone described it as contemplative. Florals, water, buildings, animals, a night sky: the pull is personal and it is not something to talk yourself out of.
If you are choosing for someone else
This is where most people go wrong, usually by choosing something impressive rather than something recognizable. The safest question to ask yourself is simple: is there anything in this picture they would point at?
A design like The Road Home works as a gift for exactly that reason. It is a farmhouse at dusk with a child on a tire swing and a dog running underneath, and a great many people look at it and see a specific summer rather than a generic one.
The more direct route is to skip the search entirely and use a photograph you already have. A custom canvas made from your own photo turns the house, the dog, the boat or the person into the thing being painted. It comes in 12x16, 16x20 and 18x24, framed or unframed, and it is printed here in the United States.
Two honest limits. It will look like a painting of the photograph rather than a copy of it, and a photo with several small faces in it does not translate well at any size. One clear subject, well lit, is what works.
What a finished one actually looks like
If you want to see the version of this that is not a marketing photograph, our customer gallery is full of finished canvases people sent in: dogs that have since died, houses that have been sold, weddings, boats, first kits finished at eighty. Those are paintings with meaning. None of them got there through a symbol.
The rest of our designs are in the full collection if you would rather start from the artwork.
