The Curation: How To Choose Artwork For Your Home and Beautiful Space
How To Choose Art For Your Home
Consider viewing your walls as a blank canvas. This is an opportunity to showcase your personality in a fun way—through color, subject, and composition. Because it’s often what we choose to hang on our walls that makes a space feel uniquely our own.
That’s the beautiful thing about art—it’s a reflection of how personal and individual your home is. It exists to remind us where we’ve been, and what we love, reflecting the beauty we are drawn to.
With that in mind, it’s important to understand that choosing art is more of an intuitive process than you might think, and no one is better equipped to tell your story than you. But, from a practical point of view, there are a few steps you can follow to help guide your purchase and make it a worthwhile investment.
In general, there are two main ways you can go about choosing art for your home - using the location as the starting point or using art that you already have as a starting point.
Option One: Using location as your starting point
Most people use location as a starting point. You may have a blank wall or specific location in mind and want to bring in art as a focal point or to enhance what’s already in your space.
If this is the case, firstly consider the style or color palette of your interior. Either assess the style and palette you already have or decide what style and palette you want to have. This is because your interior will somewhat dictate your art style.
For example, in a Hamptons or coastal style interior, an artwork that complements the predominantly blue and white color palette would probably work really well. On the other hand, a bright red artwork may not be the best choice here. Interior design style and your color/material palette confine the look and subject matter of art that works in a space.
Next is the "coordinate doesn’t match" rule. While you want your art to belong in your interior, be aware of it being ‘matchy-matchy’. Your art should speak to the furniture and decor around it; however, you’ve made a mistake if it perfectly matches the blanket throw on your sofa. This will create an uptight and serious feeling atmosphere which you don’t want. Instead, try to coordinate the color palette of your space with your art. Look for art that contains similar hues but not the exact same ones. And think further than color. Are there any patterns, textures, or motifs that could be continued through into an artwork? What themes in your space could be extended into an artwork? For example, your living room may contain natural timber that could be carried through thematically in a photograph of a forest.
Notice how the rust color on the left image is picked up in the artwork, but in a slightly different hue, yet it still feels harmonious. Or the image on the right, where the black in the pendants and chair frame is repeated by the black timber artwork frame.
My final tip here is to not force it. Don’t buy something from a big box store that you’re totally indifferent about just because you feel like you need to have artwork on the wall. Why spend money or display something that you don’t really care about? If you can’t find one that you like or care about, so be it, let the search continue.
Option Two: Art as your starting point
If you already have an established art collection and are using art as your starting point, you will generally follow the same rules as discussed but in reverse. For example, instead of choosing your artwork based on your interior, you would choose your interior based on the artwork.
This is actually one of the ‘hacks’ I teach in my course as an easy way for beginners to develop a more advanced color scheme for their home since the artist will have done the work for them. Choose the artwork that you deeply resonate with and one that best conveys the mood or atmosphere you want to have in your home. Analyze the colors and proportions so you can pick out clues in regards to color combinations, and how the colors are distributed throughout the piece. An easy way to do this is to use tools like coolors where you can simply upload the artwork to identify the colors.
There are so many places you can buy artwork, so it's impossible for me to list all of them here. But here are some stores that I think are worth a browse:
Drool
Desenio
Minted.
Evermade
Go out - go to your local fair or market (almost every city or town has art fairs), visit galleries, vintage or antique stores, second-hand stores, and small auctions (especially out in the country).
Beautiful Space
A Sydney Artist's Apartment | Written by Lucy Feagins, Photography by Alisha Gore
Struggling with decorating your home?
Check out some of our templates and resources.
Or check out my Practical Home Design course where I cover a step-by-step process so you, yourself can confidently make your own choices and design a home that you’ll love. There's roughly 3 hours of video content, and I'll also provide you with guides, handbooks, templates, and a bunch of resources to aid your learning.
See you in a fortnight!
Reynard Lowell