Frankenstein Wall Art

Frankenstein Wall Art: A Study in Low Light

Light does more to this subject than to almost anything else you could hang. The images are built out of shadow — a face half in darkness, a laboratory lit by one lamp, sickly green against deep grey — so the room's own lighting either finishes the picture or kills it. Flat overhead light spreads evenly across the canvas and the modelling in the face goes soft. A lamp set to one side, or daylight arriving from a single window, does the opposite: the darks stay dark and the highlights lift.

Treatments vary a good deal. Some are straight gothic horror, with heavy chiaroscuro, a stitched brow and apparatus crackling behind. Others are affectionate and cartoonish, flat colour and a friendly slouch, closer to a seasonal decoration than a portrait. The two registers do not mix on the same wall, so decide which one you are in before you start pairing pieces.

Colour is narrow by convention: green, bruised purple, bone white and a lot of near-black. That narrowness is useful, because it means the piece will sit beside almost any neutral wall without argument. It also means the image depends entirely on tonal contrast for its effect, and a print hung where light washes it out has nothing left to fall back on.

Seasonal use is the honest caveat. Plenty of people buy this material for October and put it away in November, which is fine, but if you want it up year round choose the painterly end rather than the pumpkin end. A restrained portrait in green and grey reads as gothic all year; a grinning cartoon with a carved lantern in the corner does not.

One placement test before you hang. Stand where you will usually be sitting, at night, with the lamps you actually switch on. If you cannot make out the shadow side of the face from there, move the picture rather than the lamp — a wall that catches side light will do more for this subject than any amount of rearranging the furniture.