apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

The deep grey-blue in photo 3 was being used in many museum installations across the country in the last few years, and was very effective almost all of the time.

Can't generalize -- it depends on the colour and the artwork in question.

I agree with mschatelaine. No way to know unless the shades are considered.

It depends on the art, but there's a reason why most galleries have white or neutral walls.

Obviously, it can work really well with the right combination of art and wall color, or it can be a distaster -- but, so can white walls.

I think wall color for the most part is unimportant so long as you remember where art is concerned, that frames are called frames for a reason - they frame your work to its best advantage, therefore, if you have bright colored walls you would need to take this into account with the way the art is presented to show it at its best, e.g. the type of frame/mat/presentation involved. No one wants their artwork to disappear into a bright sea of crazy! :)

depends on the piece, but I find the majority of the time that a stark white or grey works the best... keeps the focus on the art. That being said- there's a reason we like those bold colors in our homes, because as much as we love our art, that's not ALL we want to look at and focus on at home. The purpose of a gallery is much different than your walls at home.

I usually hate seeing rusty reds behind art. That's just a personal thing though. But i definitely think about how best to display art before I pick a paint color.

If you're considering to coordinate the wall color to your art or viceversa... you're screwed..

good quality art can and should stand on it's own... don't really matters what's around....

If you feel the need to match them, you're just turning art into some basic painted thing stretched on a canvas....

It's like having people over to a dinner party but separating them into groups according to how good their outfits and hair match your couch or the flowers you're decorating with.

and of course you need COMMON SENSE when choosing the right paint for your space.

Hmm! Interesting question! I agree, after looking at the samples, that the background color and the art make a big difference. Some of the paintings on white just look "blah" to me, but some of the paintings on color seem outshone by the color. I do like the dark blue/gray, but that could just be because it's "in" right now, and my mind is trained to approve.

I love color, and have a couple bright yellow rooms in my house. I also like old flea market paintings, but I'm not sure the yellow walls showcase them to their best advantage. From the head-on they don't please me, and I wonder if I need more bold colors to balance the yellow...

http://i208.photobucket.com/albums/bb99/mbc1963/House%20Pictures/yellowhead-on.jpg

... but when I see them from the next room, they please me very much.

http://i208.photobucket.com/albums/bb99/mbc1963/House%20Pictures/YellowTransition.jpg

And here's one of my favorite pieces of "art" - an old printer's plate of an auditorium seat plan. It's gunmetal grey on oak with black ink in the nooks, and I love the lines, but I don't think it looks great against the milk-color of my living room.

http://i208.photobucket.com/albums/bb99/mbc1963/House%20Pictures/yellowprintblock.jpg

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I used to volunteer at an art museum as a student, and I remember talking with one of the curators about the wall colors used for an exhibition. They had tried to use wall colors true to the era in which the art was painted.

This was transformative for me, having grown up with art dealer parents who always chose to have their home gallery white.

Most of my art collection hangs on colored walls. A "salon" grouping is on pumpkin orange, and everything looks great. White is boring. Nothing clashes but nothing is set off, either.

Museums and galleries often use bright and jewel tone colors these days, and the main reason for NOT doing that in the past was money -- neutral linen wall coverings were the thing, and changing them exhibition by exhibition would have been cost prohibitive in smaller institutions. (I was assistant curator of one of thse back in the day...)

my living room is painted in Dulux's African Tulip and i am in the process of installing a picture rail system to hang my photos, prints, cards and "stuff" on the walls. i can't imagine not having colour in my life - for the 10 years i shared a apartment with my sister, she wouldn't let me paint our common rooms! :-)

I have a rather large collection of paintings, prints, folk art, and First Peoples art which (except for the largest pieces) gets moved often. The paintings and prints are framed to enhance the work of art rather than as a design element in a display (a POV I have often admired, though it's not how I proceed). Because of the variety in the pieces I collect, I have chosen most often to paint the walls white, although my art wall
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3203/3113836217_567a3a52f7_m.jpg has a deep blue wall to maxmize the grid effect.

Recently I've been leaning toward painting the living area gray or beige just for a change. However it hasn't happened yet and may not.

At an art museum in Spain last week, I noticed that they had the walls painted different colors - orange, blue, brown (all fairly dark shades) - and I thought that no matter what the painting, it looked great on the colored walls.

I wouldn't have thought that until I saw it in action.

Hurts...the same very bright white walls can also. Nice neutrals seem to be better backdrops for art.

I've always preferred to see my paintings on a coloured wall. Infact, my artwork looks its worst on a white wall.

My favourite thing is to walk into a gallery and see coloured walls.

Walls in a gallery are white so we can imagine the artwork in our homes without having to edit out wall colour. White walls at home are just unimaginative, most times.