apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

You couldn't be more wrong about colorful walls and viewing art.

When you paint a room a garish color like the one above, art becomes a decoration that breaks up the color mass, similar to creating a relief pattern.

The purpose of showing artwork on a light colored wall is to allow the artwork to become the focus, instead of the wall.

Paint is a cheap fix to decorate a room on a tight budget.

I think it's a great colour and not at all garish. To me, it's calming - which is the reason I chose this colour for my master bedroom and it's the best paint choice I made for the house.

As you said, it does change colour depending on what light is on it, but what I like most of all is that it looks luxurious and makes the art (chosen carefully of course) on it look like part of a bigger "piece" of art. It brings everything together.

White is great, but can be too functional and cold at times. Suitable for galleries who very often have to take down art, remove nails, fill holes and paint over the spaces.

Dark walls suit a certain personality and light walls another, so really, no one can say that anyone is wrong or right.

Mark, I love your articles/posts on color and the use of paint. Very inspiring. Thanks! Tara in San Francisco.

Benjamin Moore has a great paint colour called Ashley Gray ... similar to above, but a bit lighter. We have painted our entire house with it and it is fabulous. All of our art work looks amazing and stands out against this colour. We also have an amazing lake view from our home and once we painted the pale walls to Ashley Gray we couldn't believe how much the lake view jumped out as you walk into the room. I haven't found an accent colour that doesn't work with it!

It's not garish, at all.

When I was in art school, we routinely used grey mats for prints and photos: the tone as well as the colour was neutral, and it really allows the tones in the images to pop.

A painting that's really ART (rather than merely a painting) might deserve to be the focal point of the room it hangs in, but most of the 'art' I see these days--including the stuff in my own place--seldom deserves such star treatment. That is, most of the time such a painting IS just decoration, and as such, it deserves no more attention than, say, a lamp or a cushion on the sofa. It's not sacred, and there's really no need to tiptoe around mass-produced, mediocre art with inoffensive white walls.

Not, of course, that I have anything agaist mediocre art: in fact, it's all I have at home: a bunch of no-name 19th century landscapes, a chunk of termite-eaten wood, a plaster cast of Apollo I made in high school. But I don't pretend that stuff is anything more than what it is. No, if there is any real art at my place, it's only in the way that I put stuff together, or the way the winter light rakes across my own gray-green walls, or in the way I arrnaged the views from one tiny room into another.

Besides, if a piece really is art, it's plenty strong enough to hold its own against colored walls. People have been putting art (and here I'm talking about the real deal) against strongly colored walls for centuries with great success, and the handsome results that can be achieved with a coat of paint are visible in the newly-reconceived European galleries at the Metropolitan Museum.

At any rate, that's a good looking room above.

Yeah for more than just one picture!!

Art is not just another decoration.

I can see why from the posts that people treat is as such - just another lamp, pillow, television, air-conditioner, rug, whatever, it's all the same.

It's not.

Every other item in this room has a function except the art, which is there only to be appreciated, both visually and mentally. That separates it from the other aspects of the room.

It deserves better than becoming a space filler to make a room "come together".

white can often wash colour out as well as make it pop. usually gray or black is actually better and causes colours to pop. most of my professors asked us to look at our work against white, black, and gray. [and on rare occasions would actually recommend coloured mats.]

nevermind, the fact that most galleries and museums have walls that are painted saturated colours similar to those shown above.

obviously, it is still about personal preference.

i think the colour shown is a beautiful background to art. [dependent on the art, of course]

That is a beautiful paint color and looks similar to one of the colors the The Getty uses in some of its galleries.