Every Picture Tells A Story

Well hello there, thanks so much for tuning in. You know, one of the things that I’m not super focused on as an interior designer is accessorizing, and I talk about exactly why this is in my episode Call Me Maybe where I go into the details of interior designers vs interior decorators. It’s not to say that accessorizing isn’t important - it makes a HUGE difference when you’re looking to add that extra level of coziness and that lived-in look. But a lot of potential clients that I talk to, and even my friends and family early on in my career, want me to arrange their decorative knick-knack shelves when they’ve already had a contractor come through and do 100 things I would never recommend, and it kind of feels like putting, while I hate the phrase lipstick on a pig because I love pigs so much, but I like to think of it as frosting on a burnt cake. I make the frosting/cake analogy to my students all the time when they want to dive into picking out table lamps and accent ottomans, but they haven’t finished large, more consequential tasks like planning the flow of their spaces. I don’t want to sound rigid, design is certainly an organic process and inspiration can come from anywhere, but sometimes I get the sense that accessorizing becomes a focus because it seems easy and it will distract from the larger, more daunting tasks that need to be well thought through before the decorative elements come into play. If you’re baking a cake, and all you can focus on is the exact color of the mirror glaze, but you don’t know what kind of cake you’re going to have,  the preferences, dietary restrictions, or number of people eating the cake - you may not be making the best use of your energy, because all that background nuts and bolts information should be factored into the final look and decoration of the cake. 

Now all that said, when it comes to accessorizing in any space -  your home, office, or storefront - artwork is by far the most impactful of the bunch. Art can completely transform the look and feel of a space, it can be used the same way color and texture is to elongate or cozy up a room. And to do it well, it requires lots of advanced planning, so today we are going to look at everything you need to do to make sure the artwork in your space looks like a slice from an art gallery.

Before we get into talking all about art, let’s look at the color of the week. This time of year the plants around me here in New York City are winding down, getting ready for winter, which means shedding leaves, squirrels are very busy collecting and burying nuts, but one late bloomer is still dancing around, reminding us of the sweet colors of summer. The purple Aster, which looks like a tiny lilac colored daisy, doesn’t finish blooming until late October, so if you’re out and about on a walk, you may get a surprise hit of purple, similar to Behr Paint’s Party Hat P560-3 with these tiny, late fall flowers. And with day light saving time ended, I personally need to soak up all the color I can get. If you see wild asters in your yard, cut a few and make a bouquet for your entry way, or bring in a Paddywax brand Color Block Collection Violet and Vanilla three wick candle for the right mix of lavender and a pop of autumnal orange. 

This episode is brought to you by Soft Landing Studio. If you enjoy this podcast and want to take your space to the next level, you can select from a variety of one-on-one virtual consultations about your specific home, office, or retail interior design project. Whether you want a quick brainstorming session, a series of regular check-ins during your renovation, or to work with my full interior design services; you’ll get amazing design ideas, life changing solutions to problems you’d never thought you could resolve, and a space you feel proud to call your own. And for the holiday season, you can now purchase gift certificates for the 45 minute Creative Consultation. This is the perfect gift for the design lover or brand new home owner in your life. Go to www.softlandingstudio.com to schedule your experience now. And while you’re there, don’t forget to download the absolutely free Guide to Getting Started. This fun-filled PDF quiz will orient you at the very beginning of your interior design journey. If you know you aren’t 100% happy in your space, but you don’t know what to do about it, this guide is for you. You will be directed towards big idea solutions, so you’ll know what to do, and most importantly, what not to do. Visit www.softlandingstudio.com for you free copy today.

I have read article after article on various design blogs that proudly proclaim that gallery walls are out! The trend that nearly every household added to their walls over the last 20 year is over, and you should be concentrating on single, oversized, statement art pieces in your home. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE oversized art in any space, but the thing is - gallery walls are solving a problem that oversized art does not. They are practical. Not all of us have large singular pieces of amazing artwork that we want to display, but most of us do have a rag-tag scrappy collection of family photos, smaller art pieces we’ve been given as gifts, maybe the occasional vintage graphic poster. If I could have a giant Marylin Minter or Calen Schuab painting hanging up in my apartment, I would. Maybe I will one day. But for now, photographs of my grand parents, my other grandmother’s old piano painting, and this weird cat lithograph print my friend found in a thrift store adorn my walls. And I love them! And clustering them together in interesting ways helps make this hodge-podge collection feel like one big, oversized art piece. And so in my mind the gallery wall lives on.

So let’s talk a little bit about tricks to creating a cohesive, pulled together, professional looking gallery wall. And let’s talk about a few practical alternatives if you are ready for a change.

The most straight forward version of a gallery wall involves nine picture frames, all the same size, probably all black and white, framed in the same frame type, placed in three equidistant rows of three. But if you’re like me, this sounds horrifically boring, so let’s extract the elements that work from this basic arrangement and give them a little more life. 

There are really three things to consider when organizing a gallery wall; color, scale, and alignment. Color considerations are twofold. You want to consider the colors in the actual art or photography that you are displaying. The same way I like to display my books grouped together by the colors in their spines, I like to group my artwork by color tones. I have a cluster of warm purples and oranges on one wall, and a cluster of mostly greens and blues on another. You can also have one large grouping that gradates from one color to another, creating a natural color spectrum. 

You also have to consider the color and style of each frame. If you have the option to reframe all of your pieces, it can help to unify everything by choosing the same frame type for the whole lot. This is an especially good strategy if you have a wide range art sizes, colors and shapes - the frame can be their uniting element. But, this can also run the risk of looking bland and uninteresting, especially if your pieces are fairly similar in size and content, for instance a wall of family photos. In this case, selecting three coordinating, but distinctly different frames will prevent the gallery wall from feeling too stiff. Try a thin light wood frame, a slightly thicker white frame with a beaded detail, and very thick metallic frame with a bevelled profile for a few of your favorite photos you want to draw the eye to. 

If you don’t have the option to reframe your pieces and you’re working with a mix of frame colors and types, take an inventory of everything you’ve got. Notice the size, color, and level of detail of every frame, and try to create a balanced composition with evenly distributed points of interest. Having an eclectic mix of frames can bring a really layered, bohemian, warm vibe. Alternately, you can  repaint all of your existing frames in the same color to bring them together visually.

Whichever route you take with the frame color and type, having a consistent matte color is very helpful in unifying all the pieces into a whole. A photo matte is the board around the photo, before the frame. It helps to separate the actual piece of art from the glass of the frame, but it ends up playing an important decorative role as well as it adds size to the overall piece. If you have a painting on a canvas, adding a matte or a layer of glass is not necessary, but you can consider a sophisticated detail like a floating frame where the piece sits about a quarter of an inch inside the frame. This adds dimension to the piece without too many extra bells and whistles. You may have an outlier piece like this, or an image that just doesn’t look right with the same color matte as everything else. In this case, find two other elements that can serve to balance the outlier.  Peppering in an odd number of unique pieces helps the composition look more intentional,  rather than having s single misfit. This could include a favorite knick knack heirloom in a shadow box, a sculptural object like a decorative plate or woven wall hanging, or antique sign, I’ve seen people hang miniature tennis rackets in the gallery walls, you can let your imagination run, just make sure it’s meaningful to you. 

I want to take you down a quick tangent about a specific style of acrylic floating frames, in particular DIY floating frames. This is a little different than the painting floating frames I was describing before. A few years ago, I found a very simple, stunning looking DIY blog post about how I could adhere a vintage poster to a piece of clear plexiglass  and screw the plexiglass directly into my wall with an offset mount in each corner. I still have this set up in my living room today, but it was not the easy breezy picture hack that the blog made it sound like. I spent weekend after weekend measuring, re-measuring, adjusting, drilling, re-drilling, and trying to get the holes of the offset mounds aligned with the ones I had drilled into the plexiglass. Once I got that figured out I had such a hard time actually getting my poster to adhere to the acrylic. The glue dots that were recommended in the DIY tutorial were not strong enough to permanently attach my poster to the acrylic and there were so many evenings when I was sitting in my living room and I would hear a clunk and the poster would have detached from the acrylic. I ended up having to permanently Krazy glue the matte around the poster to the acrylic. But in the meantime I ended up damaging all three of the pictures that I was trying to frame, which is a little heartbreaking. The moral of the story is unless it is as simple as inserting a picture between glass and a backing, leave framing to the professionals. 

Okay, back to our gallery wall. This idea of mattes starts to touch on the concept of scale and proportion. The idea of a gallery wall is to fill the space, and you’ll need to understand the size of the space in order to do this. Don’t just think about it in terms of the one wall you may be putting the art work on, think about it in terms of the overall room. What is happening on the other walls in the room? Are there windows, curtains, or mirrors that may compete with the gallery wall visually? Are there any pieces of furniture going on the wall like a headboard, a bookcase, or a media console? Give a little breathing room between these focal elements,  about 4-6” is a good rule of thumb. You’ll want to identify the elements in the room that are large, medium, and small. If you have two or more large elements in the room already, you may want to consider choosing a different space for the gallery wall, or reducing the amount of pictures in the gallery wall, so that there isn’t a conflict between too many large opposing elements. An example of a large element would be a tall headboard or a chandelier. 

Once you’ve confirmed the room is a good fit for the gallery wall, you’ll want to think about the pieces themselves. If you have a smaller piece, you’ll want to consider getting mattes between the image and the frame that are fairly wide. This will give the overall framed piece more visual weight and allow it to feel mores substantial in the space. Unless of course, you’re working in a small room like a powder room, or maybe even a walk-in closet, and then you can let the art be small as well.

In the episode Free Your Mind, I talk about some of the basic design principles that we designers use to create. Alignment is the principle that I think specially architects and interior designers rely on the most, and it’s something that I see missing from do-it-yourselfer’s and even some young designers work. Alignment is the concept of using an invisible or implied boundary or set of lines to organize a series of elements. I like to think of it as a giant imaginary magnetic laser that every sticks to. If you have five framed pictures you want to hang together, you could align them from the top, hanging them side-by-side with the top of each frame snapping into the imaginary forcefield of alignment. The sides and bottoms of the frames would fall wherever they may, but the tops will create one long, sharp, straight line. Or you could stack two rows, I would do two pictures on the top row and three on the bottom, and have the separation between the rows create alignment . So for the top row, the two picture frames would align along their bottom edges, give a little space and start the bottom row of three pictures, which would align along their top edge. The space between the rows is straight and even, and creates a sense of organization and order without being as strict as a perfect grid where all the picture would need to be the same size. In this formation, all the edges of the pictures outside of this center line will fall where they may, and can even create some interesting shapes that might surprise you. 

Now you will see gallery walls on Pinterest and maybe even at your friends house, where there isn't an alignment. Frames are just kind of clustered together in a very organic way. But for me, these walls always look chaotic and a little bit too unorganized. I recommend using the alignment method to create some structure and let the variation come from the unique sizes of your art pieces and photographs.

This approach is a little different than how I often see folks hang their pictures, because what a lot of people do is rather than aligning the frame edges, they align nail placement on the wall. This can make hanging you pictures feel easier, but no one sees where your nails are, at least they won’t if you’ve installed things correctly. This is where that old Martha Stewart hack becomes critical. Layout each framed piece you want to hang on a piece of brown craft paper. You could do this with old newspaper or paper grocery bag too. Trace each framed piece and cut its shape out. You’ll also want to mark on the paper where the hanging hardware is on the back of each frame, and this will be what you nail into. Now you are free to use a little blue painters tape and put up each piece of paper on the wall in the configuration you think you want. If you don’t like it as much as you thought you would, you can easy move things around until you are happy. And I suggest taking a picture of every iteration you try incase you want to revert back to an earlier idea. Then you simply hammer your nails where you’ve marked the location of hanging hardware, pull the paper away, and hang your gallery wall up. It sounds simple and it is, but it still takes time, thought, and consideration.

Okay, so let's say you are really just over the gallery wall. Here are a few alternative ways to include art in your home. The first of which is a picture rail. This is a really good solution especially if you are trying to minimize the amount of holes you want to drill into your walls. You can purchase picture rails at most home decor stores and they come in a variety of lengths. They are basically tiny, very shallow shelves that you can then lean your photographs and artwork on. You can mount the shelf about 6 inches below eye level depending on how big your pieces are. But the great thing about a picture rail is that it naturally creates a bottom alignment! Plus, you can easily swap out the pictures you showcase at various times of the year. So, it's great for seasonal decor, or if you have a rotating art collection. You can also mount multiple picture rails, stacked  on top of each other  with about 6” of breathing room, plus the height of the art that will go on each rail. This will effectively create the function of a gallery wall with a slightly different, more bohemian aesthetic.

The other thing you can do is consider looking at one of the most classic ways of displaying art, that you will see in every art history book, in churches, chapels, museums and even ancient ruins. That is what is referred to as a tripartite art hanging. You may have guessed it - “tri” meaning three. You’ll want to select three pieces of art or three photographs that look like they're all siblings or even cousins. So it could be part of a series of art, photographs of similar landscapes, or three photographs of your family all taken at the same time. Totally up to you. Let your creativity really blossom. And the idea is you display these all in a line 1-2-3, bam bam bam, A-B-C. This in many ways this playing on the rule of thirds from photography. There's something very visually pleasing about breaking up a single visual concept into thirds and you can make this as small or as large as you want to fit your space and your wall. You can do the pieces with a mat or without.

And lastly is lighting. If you are planning a home and you are having a contractor come in and do work for you, you need to think about where your artwork will be long before they start swinging hammers because you will want to coordinate lighting to shine on your pieces of artwork. This will help the art stand out. It will help it look good. It will help it feel polished, professional, and pull together. If you are not engaging a contractor you can look at a lot of different options for wall-mounted lights that you can hang above your piece of artwork. In an ideal world you would have a hardwired sconce above each section of artwork, but if that's not an option for you there are actually a lot of really great plug-in or even battery operated wall mounted lights that you can use. You can also take a sconce that you like and swap the actual lightbulb for a battery operated touch light that you get at the dollar store.

What’s your favorite way to display art in your home? Send me a message over on instagram. In the meantime, I’ll end with a great quote from our dear Bob Ross, who says “Talent is a pursued interest. Anything that you're willing to practice, you can do.”  Talk to you next time.