Bat Wall Art

Bat Wall Art

Hanging Bat Wall Art Beside Other Things Bats pair naturally with anything from the same nineteenth century specimen tradition: moth and beetle plates, anatomical drawings, fern studies, moon phase charts, old star maps. Put a bat plate between a moth and a botanical and the three read as a small natural history cabinet. What they fight is cheerful nursery animals and bright coastal scenes, which turn the bat into the odd one out, and pumpkins, which drag the whole wall into seasonal decoration and make it look like something you forgot to take down in November. There are two distinct kinds of bat art and they do not mix well with each other. One is naturalist: a fruit bat rendered with care, wing membrane translucent, ears and nose leaf drawn accurately, closer to zoology than to horror. The other is gothic silhouette work, black shapes against a moon, more graphic than observed. Choose a lane and stay in it. Colour is narrow either way. Sepia, bone, umber, charcoal and black cover most of it, which is why these pieces sit so easily in rooms with dark wood and old furniture, and look stranded in a bright modern kitchen. Stairwells and studies are the natural homes. Both are viewed at close range as you pass, and the detail in a good naturalist bat plate rewards that. A wing membrane drawn well is genuinely beautiful up close, and it is wasted at distance. If you group several pieces, keep the gaps between them equal and narrower than the width of the smallest piece. Uneven gaps are the single most common reason a well chosen group looks amateur once it is on the wall.