Barbara Bova: Painted walls bring pain

Unfortunately, when a picture or painting hangs in the same place for ages it's easy to pass it by and not see it. Familiarity breeds invisibility. In some ways that can be great. For instance, there's our ability to avoid a piece of furniture as we walk around in the dark. After a while we instinctively know what's in our room without consciously studying any of our furnishings on a daily basis.

The same happens to married people after living together for some time. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The picture our mate holds of us is what we looked like when we married. It comes as a shock when every so often we take a fresh look at our spouse and realize that his hair is not where it used to be and that her backside has fallen into her tummy. Many times these insights strengthen our regard for each other. Perhaps they even cause us to become kinder to each other. Unlike people, paintings never change.

We rotate the images on our walls so we can enjoy each particular painting as if it were newly purchased. After 10 years of moving paintings and photos around, our walls looked as though someone shot them full of buckshot. We solved the problem temporarily by putting more works of art up to cover the holes. Finally, we gave up and just ignored them.

An artist friend of mine says nail holes can be filled in neatly using toothpaste. Just imagine a wall filled with minty toothpaste. Instead of holes you have little white spots everywhere. Using toothpaste fillers would put those air-fresheners we buy in the supermarket out of business. There always comes a moment when we have to give up something to get something. In this case it was the decision to paint our walls and start all over again. It was a traumatic decision.

We had to take all the paintings down. After the painters left the walls looked beautiful and we felt terrible about putting the paintings back up.

We hated to break into those wonderful, perfectly painted walls and make them holy again. Such was our angst over marring the walls that it took us three weeks of research to see if there was any way we could hang our paintings without using a nail. We discovered systems that promised much but all of them entailed attaching some kind of molding to the walls. That solution wouldn't work for us. Finally, we bit the bullet and shattered the tranquility of our walls once again.

Slowly, at first, we began to hang our pictures back on the walls. We took a long time deciding where to place what. As the walls began to fill, we sped up, rarely putting the same painting in the same place as before. Now, all the hangings on our walls seem fresh and new. We hung every painting we owned, plus all the framed family photos and the little things we've collected over time.

Somehow, we've come out ahead. Now we have two blank walls just crying out to be punctured and we have nothing to put on them. There they are naked, virginal, and there they shall stay for a while. That is, until the next time we fall in love with an artist's vision.

E-mail Barbara Bova at babova@naplesnews.com.