Los Angeles Wall Art

Los Angeles Wall Art: A Question of Scale

Go bigger than feels sensible. The city is a sprawl, and the images that capture it — a skyline stacked against the hills, an aerial of grid and freeway, a boulevard vanishing into haze — are made of small repeated detail. Shrink that and the detail turns to grain, so you end up with a texture rather than a city. As a rough guide, if you cannot pick out an individual building from where you normally sit, the piece is too small for that wall.

Some subjects here do survive at modest size, and they are the graphic ones: a single lettered sign, a lone palm against a flat sky, a sunset reduced to bands of colour, one lifeguard hut. These read as shapes rather than as information, so they lose nothing when scaled down. Photographic panoramas have no such luxury.

Haze is the other thing to judge. The atmosphere that makes the city photogenic also flattens contrast towards the horizon, and an image that already looks soft will look softer in a room with weak light. Look for a strong dark somewhere in the frame, usually in the foreground, to give the eye an anchor.

Colour runs warm here: pink, coral, dusty orange, concrete grey. That palette gets on well with cream, tan, terracotta and warm timber, and argues slightly with cool blue-greys. If your room is cool and you still want the subject, night imagery is the way through, with its blue shadow, hard white and amber lights.

Before ordering, mark the outline on the wall in masking tape and live with it for two days. It sounds fussy, but this is the subject people most often under-buy, and a rectangle of tape tells you more in ten seconds than any amount of imagining. If the taped shape looks a shade too big, it is probably right.