Painting Wooden Furniture

I know that a lot of people have strong feelings about not painting wooden furniture.  I am not one of those people.  I am very much looking forward to painting the dresser, and the bar cart, and anything else I see fit to paint (although I am procrastinating out of a strong fear of screwing them up).  However I also love deep colors and grains of wood.  I play the violin, and my favorite part of really nice violins is the back, the grains and the various ways they form patterns.  On that note that is why I will not be painting this:

This is the bottom half of the china cabinet we picked up last month.  I was taking picks for an upcoming post (well, several days of exciting posts, actually) on UneVieChic, and happened to catch this as I was flipping through the photos I took.  It's the first great pic I got of the wood grain.  Each door is 4 pieces seamlessly put together to form this beautiful outward pattern.  So I'm not painting it, but hopefully if I get my act together you will get to see what does happen with it next week!