How to make your art ‘feel at home’ in your space

When planning your art display, or introducing a new piece, make sure the art “feels at home”. This is not as odd as it sounds. Combining the joy in first seeing the individual work of art with the elements in your home creates a harmony of living.

Here are three tips to create harmony in your space with art:

1. Colour: Integrating art though colour is another way of making the art feel at home: echoing blues and grays for marine subjects, subtle greens and earthy colours around landscapes, bolder colours for abstracts in aspects of soft furnishings and objects.

2. Paring: Some paintings fall naturally into a paring. When putting two paintings together in such paring, look at the two as though they were one whole piece. There is usually an obvious left and right defined by weight or colour. Bold colour and strong shapes delineate the two outside edges. Figurative work, portraits and animals prefer to look at each other. If only one of the parings is a portrait then give the subject something to ‘look at’.

3. Echoing something from the art itself will quickly give it the right setting. Relating to the subject matter in the painting with objects, ceramics and sculpture when planning how to display it is the easiest way to create harmony.