Some things you choose because they match your interior. Art should probably be the opposite.
You walk past it once.
Then again.
You take a few steps back.
And suddenly you're standing in front of a painting much longer than you intended.
That is usually a good sign.
Because buying art is strange. With a chair, you can ask whether it's comfortable. A lamp needs to give enough light. A table has to fit the room.
But a painting?
A painting only really has to do one thing: make you feel something.
And that's exactly what drew us to the work of Dutch artist Iris Halter, whose paintings have now found a place at BIGGLES.
Not as decoration.
Not as something to fill an empty wall.
But as objects with a personality of their own.
“The best art doesn't necessarily match the room. It changes the room.”
GROWING UP WITH ART
For Iris, making things wasn't something that suddenly appeared later in life.
It was already there.
She grew up in a creative environment with a mother who worked as a ceramicist and a father who painted. Art wasn't something distant that only existed in museums and galleries. It was simply part of everyday life.
And perhaps that changes the way you look at creativity.
When you grow up around people who make things with their hands, a blank canvas doesn't feel intimidating. It feels like possibility.
That early creative environment became part of Iris's own development as an artist. Over time she found her own language, her own way of working and, most importantly, her own way of looking.
Because technique can be learned.
A point of view can't.
“Perhaps becoming an artist doesn't always start with deciding to be one. Sometimes it starts by growing up believing that making things is simply what people do.”
A PAINTING DOESN'T HAVE TO EXPLAIN ITSELF
There is something we like about art that doesn't immediately tell you what to think.
You don't have to stand in front of an Iris Halter painting and understand it.
Actually, we'd rather you didn't.
Look at it from across the room. Come closer. Notice a detail you hadn't seen before. See how the colours change when the light outside changes. Discover that the part you like most today isn't necessarily the part you'll look at six months from now.
That's what separates art from so many other things we bring into our homes.
It keeps giving something back.
A beautiful object can stay beautiful.
A good painting keeps becoming something else.
THEN WE PUT ART BETWEEN THE CLOTHES
On paper, paintings and fashion might seem like two different worlds.
To us, they really aren't.
We spend most of our days thinking about colour, proportion, texture and composition. About why one combination feels right and another doesn't. About the difference one unexpected element can make.
That's fashion.
But it's also interiors.
And it's certainly art.
So when Iris's paintings arrived at BIGGLES, it didn't feel strange to place them between racks of clothing.
Quite the opposite.
Suddenly the store felt different.
A painting next to an oversized blazer. Colour behind a rail of neutral knitwear. Something completely unique surrounded by collections that will eventually make way for a new season.
It reminded us of something.
Fashion changes quickly. Art asks you to slow down.
“Maybe that's why art and fashion work so beautifully together: one captures the moment, the other can outlive it.”
PLEASE DON'T MATCH YOUR ART TO THE SOFA
We understand the temptation.
You have a beige sofa. A brown rug. Perhaps some marble. So naturally, you start searching for something beige, brown and vaguely marbled to put on the wall.
Don't.
Or at least: don't let that be the reason you buy it.
The most interesting interiors rarely look as though everything was purchased on the same afternoon.
They evolve.
There's the vintage chair you found years ago. The table you saved for. The strange object you brought home from a trip. Something inherited. Something completely unnecessary that you simply loved too much to leave behind.
Art should belong in that category.
Choose the painting you keep looking at.
The one you can't quite explain.
The one that perhaps feels slightly too big, too colourful or too unexpected.
Because once it hangs there, everything around it starts to make sense.
“Don't ask whether the painting works with your interior. Ask whether you want to live with it.”
THE BEAUTY OF THE ORIGINAL
We live in a time when almost every image is infinitely reproducible.
Save.
Copy.
Print.
Scroll.
Next.
An original painting is the complete opposite.
There is one.
You can see where the artist's hand has been. You can get close enough to notice the surface, the layers and the imperfections. What you're looking at isn't a reproduction of an object.
It is the object.
And somehow that feels increasingly special.
Just as we've become more interested in vintage fashion, handmade objects and furniture with a story, we're also drawn to things that haven't been produced thousands of times.
Things made by a person.
Things with traces of that person still visible.
MEET IRIS AT BIGGLES
And now Iris Halter has become part of the BIGGLES world.
Something we're particularly excited about, because BIGGLES has never really been just about clothes for us.
It's about finding things.
A new designer you hadn't heard of yet. The perfect pair of jeans. A vintage Chanel bag that has already lived another life. A fragrance that suddenly reminds you of somewhere you've been.
And now, perhaps, a painting.
One that you came in not knowing you were looking for.
You might walk past it once.
Then again.
And if you find yourself taking those few steps back for another look?
Pay attention.
That might be the one.
“You don't always find art because you were looking for it. Sometimes you simply recognise it when you see it.”
