Art-hanging expert Matt Adams, aka The Hangman, helps a reader bring their collection of prints and paintings alive.
Q: I recently moved house and want to hang a few pictures, but I’ve discovered what looked good in my old house doesn’t really suit the new one. I have lots of
A: The thing about hanging things is there’s no right or wrong. There’s personal preference, the most important thing to pay attention to. But there are some general design principles that you can follow.
Before we get into them though, get your furniture placed first. If you’ve moved into a new house where you’ve done a renovation, live with the furniture where you think it’s going to work for a couple of weeks before placing the items on the walls above it.
Usually, people want things centred over their furniture. If you’re not going to conform to that convention, which seems to fit with most people’s sense of symmetry, it’s important to make the disjoint between the piece of furniture and the item that sits on the wall quite obvious. Otherwise, it looks like you’ve just set your art 5cm off-centre, as though you’ve tried to centre it but failed. Let’s say you have a sideboard and you don’t want to put the picture directly above it but push it off to the left-hand side, then on the right, why not put in a lamp with a bit of height to occupy some space, or maybe a vase with flowers?
Light is another important consideration. There will be different amounts of light falling on each wall throughout the day, and different lighting sources such as overhead lights. I would try to put the darker pieces on the lighter parts of the wall to try and lift them. If you put a small dark piece into a corner, it’s going to disappear.
The other thing you need to watch is the damage that light can do. Oils are pretty robust but everything else is fairly susceptible to light damage. Not just sunlight, of course, but even incandescent lights shining down on pictures, particularly fragile things like watercolours and photographs that can get damaged quite quickly. So keep your photographs somewhere a little dim.
How you hang your art will depend on the size of the pictures and your available wall space. The bigger the items, the more space they need around them. Smaller items often make for good compositions. They generally benefit from being grouped with other pieces of different sizes and orientations, rather than all squares or portraits or landscapes.
Another way to approach it is to look at the subject matter and the style of the paintings. I would avoid putting something that’s framed behind glass next to a canvas that doesn’t have glass on it. If you’ve got two dramatically different tonal colours — one black and white, one incredibly vibrant — I’d avoid grouping them together. It’s better to try to find something that links them together, whether it be the subject matter, the style or the tone. Sometimes it’s even how they’re framed.
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Advertise with NZME.For a gallery wall, lay out the items on the floor first. If they look good on the floor, they’ll look good on the wall. Avoid just dropping individual paintings spaced out across the wall. Instead, look to create clusters. Make two or three smaller compositions, rather than just one picture here, then one picture there. Most people prefer an organic shape to the composition — one that doesn’t have straight edges. I think that looks much better as it’s much more informal.
Generally, the piece that finds itself at the centre is the focal point. It’s often selected as the centrepiece because it is either the client’s favourite or it’s the biggest piece. For example, you might have an image of a newly married couple, with just their faces. There’s a lot more intensity in that kind of image.
One of the most common questions we get is, “What’s the right height to hang pictures?” There’s no rule about height, but to start, we try to position the middle of the picture. That’s measured from the top of the picture to the bottom of the picture, at roughly eye level or just below. Of course, it does depend on whose eye level! For old villas or houses with very high studs, you tend to have to push everything up a bit, even if it’s only by 10cm or so, to account for the added height, otherwise, the picture can look a little unbalanced on the wall, with too much visible wall at the top.
Likewise, think about orientation. If you have a sideboard or table that’s only a metre wide, try to constrain the proportions of whatever you set above it to less than one metre, rather than having it overhanging. Or if you intend to hang something over a chimney breast, for example, directly above a mantelpiece, try to find a piece with the same orientation — portrait, in other words. If you have a big, long wall above your sofa, try to find a singular landscape piece or perhaps a collection of items that, when combined, have a landscape outline.
Finally, it pays to remember there’s no right or wrong. Hanging art is a bit like getting dressed. It’s all about personal preference.
Matt Adams, aka The Hangman, is a picture hanging and art placement professional. He hangs everything from heavy mirrors to fish tanks, framed photo montages to walls of certificates, and priceless artworks to sculptures.
