Want to buy some nice artwork for those barren walls?

Or maybe they're not barren, maybe they have a Guinness beer sign, or a poster of something, you know, like everyone else. You might even have a poster of a nice famous painting, maybe a Van Gogh or a Monet, but don't you want some real paintings on those walls? The reason I ask is because I did for a long time, but every time I saw something on a wall hanging at some joint, even if I thought it sucked, it was for like $500. Who would spend $500 on crap like that? So then I looked online for some guides to buying art, all I found was that cheap art is under $1000. That's not cheap.

I decided to check out some art galleries, and I found one in Chicago called the Framing Gallery in Lincoln Square, which sells original oil paintings in frames for $280+. Now I thought that was really cheap, and some of them were real nice and I was ready to splurge to buy a painting, but the owner couldn't tell me anything at all about any of the artists, having recently purchased the gallery. My fear of course was that I'd end up buying something like a Thomas Kinkade, some mass produced gaudy piece of crap that morons overpay for. So then I went to an antique mall with my wife, and we saw some nice paintings, we bought one, them we went to another place and bought another, next day we headed for a new antique place, bought a third one. Three paintings for around $300. One from 1930 (to the right), one from the 50's-60's (not pictured) and a third one from who knows (pictured up top)? All three paintings are nicer and feel more like real art then anything new hanging on a wall at a restaurant. All three are genuine oil, the oldest from 1930 is of a sailboat on Lake Michigan, on the back of the painting the artist titled it "Voyage Home" (or maybe
"Return Voyage" I can't remember). It turns out one painting is by a painter named Burnett (not pictured yet). Burnett painted Paris cityscapes, I've seen his paintings go for $150-$1,000+, it seems he painted a lot of Moulin Rouge, the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame Cathedral, I'm happy to say our painting is none of those, but if anyone knows what street it is of (as soon as I post an image of it) I will be grateful.

Our fourth painting purchase was on Ebay. It was the most fearsome, but ultimately the best of the four. The painting is of the canal of Nyhavn in Copenhagen, a place coincidentally, where my wife and I had some great herring, it is more famous as the place where Hans Christian Anderson lived. The painting is by Ove Svenson, I've looked at his paintings and I really like his style. Let me know if you like it.