If you are an art-lover who spends hours at a time in art museums gazing at paintings, choosing art for your home can be a challenge. How do you choose just one or two paintings when you love so many? And how do you afford to surround yourself with the quality of art that you admire?
For some, the answer is "Meural" – a canvas that allows you to display digital art on your wall. Meural comes with access to 100 free images selected by curators and the ability to upload your own personal art and photography, says Meural co-founder Vladimir Vukicevic, who is also director of connected canvas products at NETGEAR.
A Meural Canvas, which costs from $595 to $695 depending on your choice of frame, resembles a traditional painting and can be hung vertically or horizontally. The artwork you choose can appear on the screen for as long as you want: a minute, an hour, a day, a month or years. You can also choose to have a rotating series of artwork, all controlled by an app, touch buttons or your voice.
How "real" the art looks depends on each piece.
"We’ve recently patented our signature TrueArt technology, which is what makes the art on the Meural Canvas look and feel ‘real’," says Vukicevic. "Each artwork is displayed differently based on its attributes: for example, a painting with thick globs of paint and visible brushstrokes will look like a textured painting and a photograph will look like a print."
Membership in Meural – or not
While it’s not required, if you want access to more than the 100 free samples and your own art collection, Meural offers a membership program for $5.95 per month or $49.95 annually.
"The membership unlocks our library of over 30,000 licensed, high-resolution artworks, selected and optimized for our platform by our in-house curatorial team," says Vukicevic. "The art library gives users the ability to display over $3 billion dollars of art on the wall for under $50 a year and change the art on their wall whenever they choose."
Benefits of art in the home
There have been countless studies on the benefits of having art in your home—beyond adding beauty and aesthetic value, having art on your walls can increase creativity, decrease stress and spark conversation, says Vukicevic.
"So many members of the Meural community come to us and tell us that their Meural Canvas has ignited lively discussions in their homes and sparked an early interest in art in their kids," says Vukicevic. "We love to hear that."
Where art and technology meet
Vukicevic met his co-founder, Jerry Hu, during freshman orientation at New York University.
"We’re both first generation immigrants who came to the U.S. at age six and grew up as city kids surrounded by arts and culture," says Vukicevic. "After a few post-college years spent launching our careers in tech and business, we reunited to found Meural, based on our observation that visual artists—unlike their creative peers in music, film, and TV—lacked a mainstream and more democratic distribution platform."
Spending time binging on art instead of TV and searching for new works to display instead of surfing the net could be a new way to introduce creativity in your home.