Wall Art Guide

A frame does three jobs, and they pull in different directions. It protects the paper, it separates the image from the wall, and it belongs to the room's furniture rather...

Fashion is the only poster category where the motif is already a piece of commercial art. A perfume bottle, a pair of red lips, a couture sketch — each was...

Hold an old flower plate next to a modern flower print and the difference is not age, wear or paper tone. It is that the old one has fewer colours...

Food is the oldest still subject in Western art and one of the most reliable on a wall, but it is a category with an unusually wide quality spread. A...

Abstract art is what you buy when you know exactly what the wall needs and none of it is a subject. You know it should be warm rather than cool,...

Nobody buys a map of a city they have never been to. That makes this the one motif category where the picture is not really the product — the connection...

A quote poster is bought for its words and lived with for its letterforms. That gap is the whole subject. After the second week nobody in the house reads the...

A bird is the one wildlife motif that naturally wants a tall sheet. Almost everything else in nature spreads sideways — a landscape, a stag, a shoal of fish —...

The sea gives you one line and two fields of colour, and that is nearly the whole motif. It is the most reduced subject in landscape art — no foreground...

Children do not like animals in general. They like specific animals, in a specific order, and the order changes roughly every eighteen months. Buying for a child's wall goes wrong...

An animal on a wall is read as a face before it is read as a picture. People look at eyes first, and an animal print therefore behaves less like...

A landscape poster is doing something no other motif attempts: it is pretending the wall is not there. A flower sits on the paper. A mountain range sits behind it....