Hockey Wall Art

Hockey Wall Art: Ice, Light and Colour

Ice behaves like a mirror, which makes this subject unusually sensitive to the light in your room. Under daylight or cool bulbs the rink stays white, the blue lines read blue, and the whole image looks cold and clean, which is the point of it. Under warm evening lamps the same image goes cream, the blues dull towards grey, and the sense of cold quietly leaves the picture.

None of that is a fault in the image; it is a fault in where it was hung. If the room is lit warm in the evening and that is when you use it, choose an example with strong colour anchors — jerseys, boards, blocks of crowd — rather than a near-white composition that depends on the ice staying white to work at all.

Glare is the second consideration. A wall directly opposite a window takes a sheet of low winter sun straight across it in the afternoon. Canvas copes with that better than anything behind glass, but a pale, high-key rink shot still washes out. Side light is your friend here, as it is with most photographic subjects.

What separates the good from the ordinary is motion. Ice spray, a stick mid-flex, a body angled hard into a turn — these carry from across the room. Empty rinks can work beautifully as quiet architecture, but they are a different purchase and belong somewhere calmer. Avoid anything where hoardings and signage occupy more of the frame than the play does.

Look at the wall at the hour you actually use the room, not at midday when you happen to be measuring. Switch on the lamps you normally use. If the wall reads orange at that hour, buy for orange light rather than hoping.