Home is where the art is

Travel a lot but don't knowhow to flaunt your souvenirs with style? Shilpa Bhatnagar has some words of wisdom for you

When I’m not doling out advice on places and spaces, I’m found travelling, exploring and inevitably, picking up local art and artefacts from the places I travel to. It all usually ends up with picking up more books, art and artefacts than my suitcase and my humble abode can contain.

The temptation to display everything I’ve acquired on my most recent trip is strong, but over years of honing my techniques on creating beautiful, lovable spaces, I’ve come up with a few quick pointers on how to take a deep breath, calm down, back off from all the art, and take a creative but measured approach to displaying art in the home. Let me enumerate a few points in this regards:

Theme it out
It helps to clear out the space of all displays, and treat it like a blank canvas. Take everything down from the walls, strip the tables and surfaces of accoutrements, and take even the soft furnishings off your couches and beds, before curating and dressing up the room again.

Find a theme for the space
It could either be based on provenance – where you sourced the art from, or where it was made – or any number of other ways of grouping, like colour or form — a collection of dancing figurines from different states of India, perhaps. An acquaintance has a collection of over fifty cat figurines from all over the world! The idea is to have a thread running through the different pieces, connecting them.

Pay attention to scale
The best way to ruin a room and do injustice to art is to display a too-small piece on too large a wall — and it is far too common a mistake. There are several ways to work with large walls and small art. Scale up small paintings by adding mountings and broader mouldings to the frame. This only works up to a certain extent though.

Another way is to work with a group of small pieces – but this can often result in a random cluster of framed wall art or photographs, which, for all its popularity, frankly, needs a really brave and practised eye to get right. When in doubt, frame everything exactly the same size and hang in evenly spaced rows and columns. A well-designed grid will almost always look a lot more refined and pleasing to the eye than even a slightly badly placed cluster.

If you’re not confident about your clustering skills, ditch the collage and go geometric. Besides, it’s so much easier to do. Just make sure that the grid structure follows the proportions of the wall – at its simplest and most basic, the longer edge of the grid should ideally be parallel to the longer edge of the wall.

Think about eye-level and viewing distance. A fundamental part of determining scale is to think about where a person would be looking at the art from. If it’s a large wall at the end of a long corridor, you need to make sure that whatever you place there is visible all the way down the hall, and draws the eye in. Similarly, small, intimate spaces need art that can be seen up close, and don’t require one to step back to take it all in.

Think also, about eye-level. Resist the urge to hang it up too high – another far too common mistake. Art is to look at, to appreciate, to engage with – not to give one a crick in the neck!

Work with colours
And match it up with your other accessories. Pick out either a dominant colour from your artwork, or a couple of non-dominant colours and mirror them in your furnishings or soft accessories. For example, a large print of Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night could be mirrored with a dark teal-coloured cushion cover at the other end of the room, or, on the other hand, with a mustard-coloured throw draped over an armchair.

Don’t get too matchy-matchy though. Too much of the same thing can give one as much of a headache as a fundamental disconnect between everything in the room. The same large print of Van Gogh’s Starry Night would complement a largely neutral palette room just as well. Also, make sure that the colours in the artwork contrast sharply against the colour of the background or the wall.

Remember, walls aren’t the only place to display art. Just like framed paintings aren’t the only things that qualify as art! There’s nothing stopping you from leaning large framed prints against the wall at floor-level (expect perhaps the presence of an over-enthusiastic toddler, cat or dog), or prop them up on a shelf or table. Don’t be afraid to layer it up – larger pieces at the back, smaller artefacts in the front. Use ordinary objects like books, lamps or flowers to add to the depth of your display. It’s a home after all, not a museum gallery!

Allow the room to breathe
Like I said at the start, resist the urge to lay it all out. Not every wall and not every corner of your space needs to be filled with art. The larger or busier the display in one corner, the more negative space the rest of the room needs. The same rule would extend to the rest of the furnishings in the room – if the walls and corners are busy, let the rest of the space be largely quiet and uncluttered.

Use the rules to find your vibe — and then break the rules. The more you use the rules, the more you will discover your own style and what really works for you and your space. And once you do, your art and your home will become a seamless narrative – and the rules will cease to matter.

The art we pick up, the objects we gravitate towards, are the ones that speak to us, and that in turn tell the rest of the world a little bit of who we are. The art we pick up tells its own story and of its maker, and in turn, we use it to tell ours. And ultimately, isn’t that what a well-styled, beautiful home should be too – a space that speaks eloquently of those who live in it?

(The author is a London-based interior design consultant, urbanist, writer & photographer)