The Artist in the Family: Talia’s Pieces Around the Lake House

One of the things we’ve loved most about settling into our home on Cayuga Lake is how it slowly started to reflect our family through furniture, paint choices, and artwork. Some of our favorite pieces were created by our younger daughter, Talia.

Talia is in college, deep into pre-med, minoring in studio arts, and somehow producing pieces with a level of range and technical control that still surprises us. Over time, more and more of her work has made its way onto the walls here, and the effect is subtle but transformative.

First, at the top of the stairwell, four abstract pieces, gestural, energetic, full of arcs, splatters, and bold brushstrokes, sitting together in white distressed frames. Individually they’re small, but together they bring movement into a space that used to feel purely functional.

In the downstairs living room, her mixed-media pieces line the wall on either side of nautical clocks. They’re quiet and layered: old text, botanical drawings, bones, and landscapes washed in muted tones. They feel almost archival, like pages from a field notebook, which fits a house that looks out over water and woods.

Elsewhere in the house, you see a completely different side of her. There’s a blue peacock tapestry rendered in a bold, graphic style with sweeping tail feathers and stylized florals. Nearby, a watercolor study of betta fish drifts across the page in soft blues, corals, and golds, with a patch of reef at the bottom. Those pieces are lighter and more playful, but still incredibly detailed. They remind you that the same person who is memorizing pathways and anatomy is also paying close attention to pattern, texture, and motion.

And in the kitchen, right beside the sliding door overlooking the lake, hangs another beautiful piece: an acrylic painting of the view from the corner of our very own deck. She painted it to reflect light from the lake, the slope of the hill, and the geometry of the railing. It’s not just a landscape, it’s our landscape: the one we see every morning with coffee and every evening when the water shifts from blue to steel.

None of this was part of a grand decorating plan. These aren’t curated “gallery walls.” They’re pieces Talia created at different points in her life that now live here because they feel like part of our family’s story. Every time we walk through the rooms, we get these small reminders of who she is becoming as a person and an artist. And the house feels more like ours because of it.

If you liked this post, you might also enjoy reading about some of the other changes we made to the house to make it truly ours.

Thanks for joining us on this journey! Before you leave, don’t forget to subscribe to our blog and also check out our Facebook group, Finger Lakes Food and Wine Adventures.

Cheers from the lake,
Niki and Scott