Fall Wall Art

Fall Wall Art

The honest caveat first: autumn imagery has a season, and if you buy the most obvious version of it you will notice that in February. Orange-and-gold canopy at peak colour is glorious in October and slightly insistent by spring. That is not a reason to avoid the subject, but it is a reason to look at the quieter end of it — a bare branch against grey sky, a bracken hillside gone rust brown, fog over a stubble field — which carries the season without shouting the date.

Saturation is where these images go wrong. Real autumn foliage holds a good deal of brown, olive and dull yellow between the reds, and that variation is what makes a photograph believable. When every leaf glows the same fluorescent tangerine, the picture stops looking like a place and starts looking like a filter. Favour images that still have some dead leaves in them.

Room fit is unusually forgiving here, which is part of the appeal. Rust, amber and deep green sit comfortably against white, cream, warm grey and natural wood, and this is one of the few palettes that improves a room full of brown furniture rather than fighting it. The rooms to be careful in are cool ones: a bathroom with grey tile, or a bedroom done in blue, where autumn colour tends to look as though it wandered in from somewhere else.

Scale should follow the structure of the image. Wide woodland scenes need room to breathe and lose their depth when squeezed small. A single tree, a close crop of leaves on wet ground, or a misty lane holds up in a smaller format because there is one clear shape to read.

Try this before deciding: picture the piece hanging in March, curtains open, light flat and blue. The ones that still look right in your head are almost always the ones with structure — branches, water, mist — rather than the ones carried entirely by colour.