Top Tips!PICTURE PERFECT

The first thing to realise about art is never choose it to match your decor. Buy a canvas because you love it, not because it is the perfect size for a bedroom wall or because the colour scheme complements your newly decorated living room.

That said, artwork must complement the surrounding decor: hang a large contemporary Chinese canvas in an otherwise Western-style home and it will look out of place – regardless of how beautiful it is. So if there’s no place for a particular picture in your current home, bite the bullet and put it into storage. This can actually be a blessing in disguise: if you display the same piece year after year you will stop appreciating it – it’s a good idea to rotate pieces regularly.

Height And Arrangement

Artwork should enhance rather than dominate a room and how you display it counts. The easiest way is to focus on each painting individually, using a large canvas to make a big statement on a large wall and keeping smaller works for smaller spaces.

Be sure to choose a wall space that is proportional in size and orientation to the art you want to display. For example, a very high, narrow wall in a bathroom may be a good place to hang a vertical arrangement of three framed pictures, but not a good place to hang an over-sized, panoramic painting. Use small pieces between windows and doors, and think about proportion. Hang small pictures in too large a space and they will look lost. With larger pieces, allow room for people to step back and admire the work.

If you have the space, for instance in the hallway, you can hang a miscellany of art – watercolours and maps, prints and oils – side by side. Work this type of gallery display out on the floor first, by laying pictures side by side like a jigsaw to see which fits best where. Pay special attention to how different sized pictures relate to each other: large, predominant pieces should be balanced with smaller, minor pieces. And make sure there are equal amounts of space between each – a good rule of thumb is to space pictures 8 to 10 centimetres apart.

When creating a grouping, your safest bet is to choose an odd number of items. This way, there’s a picture in the middle and a mirror image on both sides, which ensures your arrangement looks balanced and complete. Position the most prominent piece in the centre and work outward.

Hanging artwork too high is one of the most common decorating mistakes: the centre of the image should be at eye level, between 150 centimetres and 165 centimetres up from the floor. When hanging multiple pictures around a room, where doorways and windows separate the pieces, don’t try to level the bottoms or tops of frames –level the middles. To display artwork at eye level in a living or dining room, where people are usually sitting, hang the pieces at the eye level of the sitter. If you are displaying art in a group, then the centre-point of the group should be at eye level.

A common problem when hanging artwork above a sofa or sideboard is that it’s not in proportion: having pieces that are too small or too large will make the whole arrangement look off. Make sure artwork is at least two-thirds the size of the sofa or sideboard. For