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Hanging Art in a New Space

Tuesday, October 13, 2009 · 5 Comments

After a few days of hiatus, I am back online! We just moved into a new apartment and are in the process of unpacking and hanging our art. Given that placing art can be as daunting as buying your first piece, I’ve decided to blog the process and provide some tips along the way.

While I generally agree with the adage of starting with the largest pieces, I don’t view this as a hard and fast rule.  Our biggest piece, pictured above, landed on the angled wall in our living room which gives the painting the prominence it deserves.

The single most important piece of advice is to experiment. It may take you two, three, four tries to get it right… it’s just part of the process.

Important considerations as you place art in your home:

* Context is key. Is it a statement piece, a serious piece, a personal piece?  The type of art and the mood it suggests are very important factors.  Personal or quirky pieces often end up in our bedroom, while serious and statement pieces often land in the living room and hallways.  A good example is a painting at my parents’ house of dogs sniffing each others’ behinds.  It’s a humorous piece and is appropriately-placed in a bathroom, but anywhere else it would just come of as weird!

* Size matters. How big is the piece and how much wall space is available?

* Stand-alone or grouping. Do you have pieces that work well as a group?  Groupings are not limited to diptychs or triptychs or works by a single artist.  You can group by color, theme, style, size, etc. It’s OK to take some creative liberty on groupings, as long as there is some coherent theme.

Tags: Living w/ Art

5 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Mamat // Dec 27, 2014 at 8:15 am

    Yeah, I guess my wedding vows (is it bad I didn’t even think of that?). In clegole, I wrote a feature article for our school paper about a neighborhood that was being forced to gentrify by a local alderman (it was in Chicago). It was a big mess that involved a historical district being created in the wrong area, a burned down landmark bar that should have had historical status that was being shut down rather than replenished, a lot of angry residents who were never consulted about the project, and a lot of stagnant construction with big names attached to it. I ended up winning a big student journalism award because of it and got to go to San Francisco and compete further with a lot of other awesome student journalists, and got 3rd place and won a scholarship and everything. So I guess that’s the piece I’m most proud of.

  • 2 Milu // Dec 28, 2014 at 10:02 pm

    Writer by trade too…. I think the best pieces i’ve wrttien are on issues I feel passionately about like organ donation and pieces I did where I spent the day with people like drug addicts and the homeless that changed people’s perception. I also ran a campaign when I was a health reporter that paid for a children’s high dependency unit at the local hospital… Lots of emotional stuff to tug on people’s heartstrings…

  • 3 Bong // Apr 2, 2015 at 3:57 pm

    My graduation thseis haha….NOT. That just barely got me graduated.I wrote a paper on Edgar Allen Poe (an analysis of a few of his well known pieces) in my undergrad at some point…and I was damn proud of it. My professor called me the night he was grading papers just to tell me how great it was. THAT MADE MY WEEK:)

  • 4 Deinman // Apr 10, 2015 at 10:28 am

    I lift my glass to the awful truthWhich you cant reveal to the ears of youthExcept to say it isnt worth a dime Τρέχω για να προλάβω το τρένο.(Αλήθεια, δεν είναι εξυπνάδα, θ’ αργήσω)

  • 5 Atefeh // May 3, 2015 at 8:42 pm

    hooray independance will make you stnorg ..following the trends with the others is behaving like sheep and no one wants to do banking with sheep. Oh and its not final till you get rid of all their stuff! Send it in a truck and dump it on the nature strip out front of their houses and then live life to the fullest you deserve it

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