Texas Wall Art

Texas Wall Art: Room by Room

This suits a den, a hallway, a home bar or a teenager bedroom, and it rarely suits a small bathroom or a delicate bedroom. The reason is tone rather than size. Texas imagery carries a lot of implied noise — big skies, longhorns, oil derricks, neon, bluebonnet fields running to the horizon — and rooms meant for winding down tend to resist that. Give it somewhere people talk and it earns its place. Put it where you want quiet and it will keep talking.

Within the subject, the variants behave quite differently. A longhorn skull or a lone steer is graphic and austere, closer to sculpture than to landscape, and it wants space around it and a plain wall. A bluebonnet field is soft, blue-purple and almost pastoral, and it is the one version that will happily go in a bedroom. City skylines belong in offices and stairwells. Rodeo and neon sit best where there is already something to drink.

Colour runs hot and dusty: burnt orange, sun-bleached tan, dark denim blue, the odd shock of turquoise. It works against white plaster, exposed brick, saddle leather and warm timber. It fights chrome, cool grey and any paint with a pink undertone.

Scale should follow how empty the image is. Wide landscapes with a low horizon and a great deal of sky need width to make sense, and hung small they collapse into a strip of nothing. Object images — a hat on a fence post, a pair of boots, a single skull — survive being modest, because a clear shape holds the middle.

If you are hanging above furniture, measure the furniture first and aim for an image around two-thirds to three-quarters of its width. The common regret with this subject is not the picture but the gap either side of it, which makes even a good landscape look apologetic.