Painting Wall Art

Painting Wall Art: Scale Before Subject

Painted images need more size than photographic ones to do their job. Brushwork is the point — the direction of a stroke, the ridge where paint piled up, the place someone changed their mind — and all of that is the first thing to disappear when an image is shrunk. Below roughly half a metre on the long edge, most painterly work stops reading as a painting and starts reading as a pattern of colour. If a wall genuinely only takes something small, pick a simple composition rather than a busy one reduced.

Style decides how much room you need. A loose, gestural piece can take a whole wall and still feel light, because the eye keeps moving across it. A dense composition — a still life, a crowded interior, a landscape full of incident — asks the viewer to stop and look, so it wants a spot where stopping and looking is natural: a hallway you pass slowly, the wall opposite a dining table, the end of a landing.

Light deserves a thought too. Paintings were made under one kind of light and are hung under another, and the difference shows most in the darks. A canvas with deep shadowed areas needs a decently lit wall or the lower half turns into a black shape. Side light is kinder than a downlight directly above, which tends to blow out the top edge and leave the bottom sunk.

Framing habits vary and there is no rule, but painted images generally cope better than photographs with being hung unframed. The edge of the image is already soft, so it does not need a hard border to finish it, whereas a photograph often does. Worth bearing in mind if you are mixing the two on one wall.

A useful test: step back to the distance you will normally view it from, then squint. If the composition still holds together as a few large shapes once the detail drops away, the size is right. If it collapses into an even mush, either you need it bigger or you need a simpler image.