Albert Williams Wall Art

Albert Williams Wall Art

How Large a Floral Still Life Needs To Be A still life of flowers has to be big enough that a single bloom reads as a bloom. That is the whole test. In most of this work the arrangement fills the frame and one flower head occupies roughly a fifth of the width, so anything under about forty centimetres across reduces each head to a smudge of colour, and the painting stops being a painting of flowers and becomes a pattern. Go the other way and there is a ceiling too. These are intimate pictures, painted at table distance, and pushed past a metre and a half the brushwork separates into visible strokes and the composition loses the tightness that held it together. Somewhere between sixty centimetres and a metre and a quarter wide is where most of them are happiest. The subject is traditional and painterly: peonies, roses, hydrangeas and mixed garden flowers in a vase or jug, usually against a soft neutral ground, with light arriving from one side and a shadow pooling under the vessel. It is the oldest wall subject there is, and it has never needed rescuing. Rooms that take it well are the ones with furniture the same age as the idea. A dining room, a hallway with a console table, a bedroom with a lamp beside the bed. It is the wrong picture for a bare industrial space, where it reads as apologetic rather than quiet. Measure the piece of furniture you intend to hang above, take between two thirds and three quarters of its width, and start there. Then check that the bottom edge will clear the tallest thing standing on that surface by roughly a hand's width, or the flowers and the lamp will spend years fighting for the same space.