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We moved a few months ago and now that we are almost done painting (we're aren't very fast, are we?) it time to hang our pictures. This house is totally different from our old house. We have a newer Florida house and our taste is simple and modern for the most part.
So I'm curious how you decide where to hang paintings/prints/photos. Do you group similar subjects in a room (outdoor scenes, buildings, portraits, animals, abstract)? Do you group similar colors? Do you group oils or photos? Do you make a point of mixing them up? I thought I would automatically know where each picture goes, but now I'm having lots of second thoughts. Thanks!
That's a very difficult problem. I tend to group mine by theme. I can tell you that when I hung mine in my new house, I wish I had used the 3m hangers right from the start. They work really well if you follow their directions and they leave no marks or holes on the wall, so if you decide to move something, you can with no problem!
Look through magazines and decorating websites for ideas....hanging art is, well....an art. You need a good eye to hang art successfully. Most people hang art too high. Many put the wrong size art on their walls. Learn by observing - look at magazines, websites and nice model homes.
I usually start by deciding what size frame would fit on a particular expanse of wall, and then place my artwork accordingly (or get a new frame and something to put in there, if I don't already have something suitable).
My biggest problem with our Florida house was the more-open concept, meaning fewer walls for hanging things than we had in the Northeast. So, I know what you mean about having second thoughts about how/where to hang photos, paintings, and the like when a new house is different than the old.
I ended up going by theme and color and not so much by the medium. My family room, for example, is painted green. On its largest wall I've hung a large oil painting of a forested river that has a bit of that green in it. The painting is not exactly in the center of that wall, but is centered above the seating group that's there. Above the fireplace I have an old silk pillow covering in a frame, and the embroidery on the pillow covering also has a bit of the wall's green. The frames are totally different. The oil painting sits in a wood frame that blends well with the wood in our furniture, and the pillow covering is in a gold-tone frame which enhances the embroidery and blends nicely with the gold-tone of the fireplace doors.
I also had to switch gears a bit -- wall art that used to hang in the family room in our old house now works in our bedroom in our new house. In that room I went with artwork that had a sense of blues since that's the main color of our bedroom. In there, it's a mixture of oils, photos, and prints. Our office has sky-n-clouds wallpaper with a large border along the baseboard of a dog playing in long grass. Since we were too lazy to get rid of it, I went with it and collected every piece of artwork we had that featured animals and put them up in that room, now dubbed The Dog Room. I did buy some new wood frames to replace some gold-tone ones so that all the pieces are framed in wood (but not all the same kinds or colors of wood).
To make decisions about where things should go, I stand somewhere in a room and take all of the room in at once, not focussing on any particular detail or part of the room. This allows me to "see" where there are "holes", and my mind's eye says "something is needed there on that wall about [such-n-such] dimension". I then go to my stash of stuff and find something the right size, making sure its colors don't clash with the room (something predominantly burnt orange wouldn't work in a frilly pink room :-)
A couple things about art, first, it needs to be proportionate to the space. I had a friend that didn't like clutter, fine, but she had an 8x10 picture hanging over her couch. She kept telling me something didn't look right and I told her she needed something a lot larger there but she thought it would be "too busy". When I took a larger picture from another room and showed her, she finally got it. So, if you have a couch and a large picture, that is all you will need there but if you have smaller pictures, you need to do a grouping to fill up the space.
Next, you want to decorate the furniture, not the wall. Don't just slap up a picture because there is a wall.
If I am doing a grouping, I lay them out on the floor in front of the wall I want to hang them on and work out the arrangement, then hang them.
I usually have this formula where I take the height of the wall and the square footage of the wall overall, then look at the size of the individual prints or the size of a large print, then come up with what I would think would be the best arraignment. Then I put it all away and ask the DW what she wants where, and do that instead. Seems to work out much better.
I've got it streamlined down to getting the prints and just waiting for directions from her when they come in for placement.
All partial kidding aside. You do have to look at the size and shape of the area you want to hang the photos/paintings in and try to match the print to the area. Like was said above an 8X10 over a couch will look very odd, same as a 60X40 on a bathroom wall would be out of place(unless your bathrooms are 10X larger than anything I've got.) What it comes down to though in the end is your own personal tastes, If an 8X10 over a sectional looks good to you and makes you happy, then that is the right placement. 99.99% of us don't live in a home where they conduct art tours through, if you do then you probably already have a curator to take care of this kind of stuff. The rest of us just have to make ourselves happy with how we hang our art.
Next, you want to decorate the furniture, not the wall. Don't just slap up a picture because there is a wall.
So true!!! I find it looks very cluttered when people put a little picture on every section of wall. Your eye needs a place to rest and that helps highlight the rest of the art.
My personal rule of thumb is if there is not room for more than an 8"x10" and there is nothing else (furniture, window treatments, etc.) to anchor the picture, then the space is probably better without anything.
If you have a nice variety of pieces and media; original art, I think you might be surprised how nice a balanced, yet somewhat haphazard grouping can look.
I have a pretty mixed up grouping against half of a living room wall with an off-center built in arch on the other half. It includes all types, sizes and styles of original art- framed and not, some rather traditional over 100-year old plein aire pieces, some simple unframed still life, abstract, sketches, watercolor, pastels -you get the picture- and I think it looks great. It seems counterintuitive, but having totally different pieces next to each other seems to makes each stand out on their own a little more. This grouping is balanced somewhat by a couple of simpler, similar and linear groupings on the other walls.
Art is such a personal thing and this I suppose is part of my personality and aesthetic, and if you have distinctly themed pieces, whether the (rather generic in my mind) "idealized landscape" motif, or (better) sketches or renderings that distinctly relate to one another including with framing and size, then a more rigid grouping is warranted.
As others have noted almost everybody places pieces too high. Just buy original art that you enjoy and place it where it will make you smile- not to center a sofa.
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