For years I've been scared to paint the walls in the house for fear that I'll pick colors I hate, or that the furniture or carpet won't match the paint, or that some other cosmic mistake will result. I tried wallpaper in a previous house, some of it on the advice of a decorator. The decorator-spawned paper was horrible and I hated it every time I so much as glanced at it. The rest was tolerable, but in this house I wanted paint, not wallpaper, and I wanted intense, saturated colors that you can see from three houses away.

Now that I have colors on (most of) the walls, I also wanted something to go on the walls that weren't timid prints, or the same old watercolors that I gravitate toward all the time. I bought a few pictures on eBay that will be fine once they're framed, but I really wanted some grown-up art. I wanted to buy something important (read=expensive), hang it on my wall and not feel guilty about it. I managed to accomplish the first two.

Here's the one I actually bought (called Angel and Dove) - it's tiny and Rebecca is scandalized that I bought a painting with a nude woman in it. And here is the one of the other two that I've brought home to determine if I want to buy them (I do).

The colors in the Woman in Yellow Dress startle me every time I walk into the room where it currently lives. It's bold and bright and completely out of character for me. The other one I have on loan, Three Women, which I wrote about several months ago when I first saw it, is a bit more muted, but still has vibrant shades of teal and crimson and peach. I don't have an image of it, because I can't figure out how to break into a PowerPoint slideshow that contains that and a couple of others (like this one, Red Head ), that I'm thinking about buying. These are all by a woman named Lauren Acton, a local artist. They amaze me with the languid positions of the women, the contrast with the movement of the lines and the stunning use of color. If I can't be an artist, at least I can support someone who is.