Deborah Buck’s favorite color is a shade of turquoise she has named Buck House Blue. “It’s a glamorous color for me,” Ms. Buck said. The color is seen throughout Buck House, her antique store at 1264 Madison Avenue. Buck House Blue tiles, objects, pillows, and other decorations also fill her apartment, and she often wears turquoise-colored clothes and jewelry. But her favorite painting, “Little Red Riding Hood” (1999), does not have a shade of blue in it.

Ms. Buck bought the Karen Kilimnik painting in 1999 at Gallery 303 in Chelsea. She said she had an immediate affinity for it because it resembles a painting she had done herself.

The Kilimnik painting in Ms. Buck’s home depicts a maroon and gold carriage going through dark woods, with a full moon in a deep purple sky. “My painting was a side of the woods narrative, except the carriage was a burning Mercedes,” Ms. Buck said. “My painting was darker.”

Ms. Buck has an art studio in her expansive apartment at 90th Street and Madison Avenue, which she shares with her husband, philanthropist Christopher Buck, and their 12-year-old son, Sam.

“I think of Cinderella when I look at the painting,” Ms. Buck said. She was also attracted to it because the color felt familiar to her, and the size (19 1/2 by 15 1/2 inches) is intimate. She said she feels a stronger emotional connection to paintings by women. “I knew a man didn’t paint that painting,” Ms. Buck said. “I feel like there is intrinsic female imagery and inherent female sensibilities in the painting.”

At the time Ms. Buck bought the Kilimnik painting, the American artist was not well known. Over the past few years, however, Ms. Kilimnik has had several solo exhibitions, including one at the South London Gallery in London. The value of her paintings have risen accordingly.

Ms. Buck’s own art mentor, beginning in her high school years in Baltimore, was abstract artist Clyfford Still. He encouraged her to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. For seven years, Ms. Buck worked as a drawer and designer for a subsidiary of Walt Disney Productions in Baltimore. She began painting fulltime, first in Baltimore and then in New York City. Her paintings were shown at Blom & Dorn Gallery and the Bronx Museum of Fine Arts in New York and C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore, among others.

Ms. Buck went to cooking school and had a stint on network television, but is now back to painting regularly. Her recent subjects include imagined thermonuclear flowers. Some of her works are on display at the Madelyn Jordan Fine Art Gallery in Scarsdale, N.Y.

While the Kilimnik painting is not to Ms. Buck’s usual taste, two of her favorite decorative objects more closely follow her aesthetic preferences: a pair of French antique porcelain chargers she found at the Marche aux Puces in Paris in 2003. They feature a colorful arrangement of flowers, birds, and tree branches painted on a bright turquoise background. “I liked them because I thought the painting on them was extraordinary,” Ms. Buck said. “The workmanship and rendering on them is phenomenal. If I were a pair of plates, these are the plates I’d be.”

Buck House, which has been open for five years, sells fine and decorative arts from the 19th century to mid-20th century, and modern pieces from Europe, Asia, and America. In March 2005, Ms. Buck opened up a gallery several blocks north of the store. At the Gallery at Buck House, she hosts contemporary and emerging artists, holds book signings, and shows furniture from Buck House. It is open by appointment only.

Ms. Buck said she wants the gallery to be “like a venue for creative exploration in a modern age that replaces salons at the end of the century in Paris.” Her most recent exhibition, a group show curated in September by Charlie Scheips, was “Seeing … BLUE.” It featured works by artists Jack Pierson, Nicholas Howey, Dave Muller, Sean Mellyn, and Jay Battle.