Octopus Wall Art

Octopus Wall Art: The Problem of Eight Arms

An octopus has no fixed outline. Eight arms, each capable of curling anywhere, means the silhouette changes completely between one image and the next, and that is the single fact that decides whether a print works on your wall. A compact, coiled animal reads as a rounded mass and sits happily in a square. A splayed one, arms running to the edges, is really a radial pattern and needs breathing room on all four sides or it looks cramped on a narrow wall.

Suckers are the other detail worth attention. They are what makes the underside of an arm legible as an octopus rather than a length of rope, and they only survive at a decent size. Small prints of the full animal lose them, at which point you are left with an ambiguous grey shape. If you want a small piece, buy a crop — one arm, part of the mantle — rather than a shrunken whole.

Two treatments dominate this subject and they suit different rooms. Antique scientific plates, ink lines on cream, are dry and bookish and go well in a hallway, study or downstairs loo alongside anything else that looks archival. Painterly or photographic octopuses in deep blues and inky blacks are dramatic and want space, low light and a dark or strongly coloured wall behind them. On a bright white wall the dark ones often just look like a hole.

Bathrooms are the obvious room and the trickiest. Steam, splash and a shortage of wall are all working against you, so keep pieces away from the shower side and be honest about whether a narrow strip above the towel rail can hold anything larger than a modest panel.

One thing to check before buying: find the eye. In a good octopus image you can locate it within a second or two, and it anchors everything else. In a weak one, the arms take over and the animal reads as decorative tangle. Whether you want the eye visible or not is a matter of taste, but you should know which you are getting.