Visceral. Ha ha.

The posters I decided to order one day arrived in the mail last week. A couple of weeks ago, my roommate and I were trying to decide how to make our room less glaringly white. She ended up hanging photos in beautifully coordinated frames on her side, and I channeled a high-school era daydream on mine.

My semester at Hemet High included a stint in the infamous Herold's ("I'm the whore of") AP Art History class. King Herold, as he insisted, to which many students gladly complied, he be referred to, made art as accessible and as relevant as he could possibly hope to in a semi-rural public high school with information quotas to be filled and AP tests to be passed. I owe a lot of my recognition of major works to the slides we flipped through and the outlines we made of the painfully massive Janson's History of Art.

Herold maintained contact with many of his former students, and he'd often match masterpieces with anecdotes. When we studied Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights," he mentioned a guy who covered his dorm room wall with a print of it because it was so intricate, he would always have something different to look at.

I think that was the first time I realized that art could have a place in everyday life, if I wanted it to. The idea of art prints in a college dorm appealed to me on some visceral level and stuck with me, and it finally occurred to me a few weeks ago that I could buy pretty much whatever I wanted online. So I did.

"Girl with a Pearl Earring" by Jan Vermeer appeals to me for a strange combination of the movie, Vermeer's happy home life, and the intricate realism of Dutch painting. The panel of Gustav Klimt's "Tree of Life" has Klimt's whimsical ardor. I'd never seen it before I started looking for suitable prints, and I was surprised to find something unfamiliar so compelling. Renoir, with his emphasis on beauty, ("Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world") always struck me as a genuinely happy individual (his misogyny notwithstanding), and my mom once told me that I looked like a Renoir, which I still consider the highest compliment she has ever paid me. "The Dance at Bougival" just seemed right.