In Good Company: Spending the Holidays With Art
For festive hearts and tender ones alike, a small love letter to living with art
Cabbagetown Home, Toronto
The holidays have a way of turning the volume up on everything.
For some, it’s twinkling lights, full tables, and a calendar that somehow fills itself. For others, it’s a quiet apartment, a half-packed suitcase, an empty chair at the table, or a year that didn’t quite go to plan. Most of us sit somewhere in between - grateful, a bit tired, a bit tender.
In all of this, I keep coming back to one simple question:
What does it look like to spend the holidays in the company of art?
Not in a fancy, museum-opening way, but in the small, everyday sense: the painting you walk past with your morning coffee, the vintage portrait that watches over the sofa, the tiny work on paper taped near your desk.
When you are in a celebratory mood
Brent Hardisty (Toronto, B. 1989)
Acrylic on Canvas
24” x 18”
If you’re feeling festive this year, art can meet you there beautifully.
Maybe it’s:
rearranging your walls for the season - bringing a particularly joyful piece into the room where everyone gathers
propping a small painting or drawing on the mantle alongside candles and cards
putting fairy lights around a framed vintage work and letting it become an honorary guest at the party
Art doesn’t have to be “holiday themed” to participate. A bold abstract, a tender portrait, a small landscape from an emerging artist can all become part of the scene. They hold the energy of the room, catching little flashes of conversation and laughter as they watch from their hooks and nails.
If you’re hosting, art is a gentle ice-breaker. Guests drift toward pieces that catch their eye and ask, “Where did you get this?” or “Who is she?” Suddenly you’re not talking about work or weather, you’re talking about stories, places, and artists whose lives are quietly woven into your home.
When the holidays feel heavy
Amy Thomson (Toronto)
Oil on Canvas
36” x 24”
Of course, not every December is celebratory.
There are years when grief is fresh, when finances are tight, when family feels complicated or far away. Sometimes the glitter of the season only makes that ache sharper. If that’s where you find yourself this year, I see you.
This is where art can become less decoration and more companion.
Art can be:
a soft focus for the eyes when your thoughts won’t settle
a quiet witness to long, solitary evenings
a small, steady reminder that beauty and difficulty can exist in the same frame
You might light a candle near a painting that feels especially grounding. You might sit across from a portrait and let yourself be seen by it. You might open a book of images and move slowly, one page at a time, without needing to “understand” any of them.
Art doesn’t fix anything. But it can make it easier to be with whatever you’re carrying, offering a little distance, a little tenderness, a little shared humanity.
Art as enhancement, art as escape
Laura Thipphawong (Toronto)
Oil on Canvas
24” x 24”
One of the quiet gifts of art is that it can hold opposite roles at once.
Sometimes art enhances what’s already there:
leaning into warmth, nostalgia, abundance
reflecting the colours and chaos of a crowded living room
echoing the mood of a family recipe, a favourite song, a ritual you repeat every year
Sometimes art offers escape:
a surreal miniature that pulls you into a dream world
a tiny seascape above your desk that feels like a portal out of the city
a mysterious figure who seems to be thinking your thoughts for you, so you don’t have to
Both are valid. There’s no correct way to “use” art over the holidays. You’re allowed to choose work that comforts you, challenges you, distracts you, or simply keeps you company while you wash dishes in the half-dark.
Small, gentle rituals with art
Bradley Reinhardt (Toronto)
Acrylic on Canvas
24” x 24”
If you’d like to bring art a little closer to your holiday season, here are a few small rituals that don’t require a big budget or a major rehang:
Choose one piece to “visit” every day.
Stand in front of it for a minute or two. Notice one new detail: a brushstroke, a colour shift, a line you hadn’t seen. Let that be your tiny pause for the day.Write a short note to an artwork you love.
It might be a piece you own, something you saw in a gallery, or an image in a book. What did it give you this year - comfort, courage, a sense of being understood?Create a mini-salon on a shelf or side table.
Mix a small work by an emerging artist with a vintage photograph, a postcard, a stone or object from a walk. Let it be your private, evolving “holiday altar” to the year you’ve just lived.Share an artist’s work with someone who needs it.
Send a link, a screenshot, or a postcard, not as a shopping suggestion, just as a “this made me think of you.”Sometimes being seen through art is a gift in itself.
How this connects to what we do
Alexandra Swistak (Vancouver)
Oil on Canvas
7” x 5”
Around here, we spend a lot of time with art made by emerging voices, many of them BIPOC, many self-taught or working a little outside the usual paths, alongside vintage pieces that have already lived other lives. It’s a natural gravitation toward work that feels quietly truthful and human.
Underneath it all is a simple belief:
that everyone deserves to live with art that feels honest, soulful, and alive,
not just in the bright, celebratory seasons, but also in the messy, tender ones.
The artists we work with are also moving through their own holidays: painting between shifts, shipping work from small studios, navigating family, grief, celebration, and fatigue just like the rest of us. Every piece that finds its way into someone’s home is a tiny bridge between those realities.
As we close out the year, I’m thinking less about trends and more about companionship:
art as company for those who are celebrating loudly
art as company for those who are keeping things very quiet
art as a way to feel connected to other lives, other rooms, other hearts, across cities and time zones
Looking toward the new year
Shadi Majlessi (Toronto)
Mixed media on canvas
31”x31” (with frame)
For 2026, my wish - for Curio, for our artists, for you - is simple:
May we keep making and choosing small, true things.
May we let our walls reflect not who we think we should be, but who we actually are.
May we remember that art belongs in kitchens, bedrooms, hallways, and tiny corners where real life happens.
Whether this season is joyful, complicated, lonely, or a strange mix of all three, I hope you find at least one artwork - on your own wall, in a friend’s home, in a community space, or in a quiet corner of the internet - that makes you feel a little less alone.
In art, we unite; in art, we live.
And I’m grateful to be sharing this patchwork with you.