Welcome to Celebrate Your Life Celebrate Your Home. I am Melissa Galt, your host. I am an interior designer and I am your lifestyle guide. I am also the author of Celebrate Your Life, The Art of Celebrating Every Day. And today, I am here to share with you some tips on display and on collecting.
First of, I get asked all the time is what height do I hang my pieces at? The correct answer is eye level for the activity of the room. Now what does that mean? When you enter an entrance, a foyer, you are generally standing. Unless it's a grand one and then you have got chairs for people to sit down and wait on you. That's if you lead such grand life. So your hanging in entrances or foyers at eye level height standing up. If you have got somebody at home who is 6 foot 6 and somebody else who is 5 foot, take it a happy medium, 5 foot 7. That makes a big, big difference because you want them walking and look at the artwork, not up at it and not down at it.
When you are in your dining room, you are sitting unless you have nothing but buffets. And if you are sitting, you want to bring down the height of the pieces a little bit. Or when people sit down at your table they are going to be looking up at the artwork again. So you are hanging for eye level of the room and the activity in the room, very, very important.
Framing. Framing is critically important to your art pieces. It is the stage that the art is set upon. You want to typically use lighter outside mattes and you want to consider using a weighted bottom. That means the bottom of the matte is three quarters to an inch deeper then the top. It will look identical but our eye visually requires that, if you don't have it, it won't look like it's even. Very, very important consideration.
When you are hanging many pieces on the wall you want to make this work so that you notice the images not the order in which they are hung. And the best way to do that is to keep an imaginary line across the top or an imaginary line across line the bottom. And then an imaginary line down one side or the other. Very important because if you have a scale arrangements people will notice the negative space between the pictures before they notice the pictures.
Again, you want that line across the top imaginary and a line down one side, keep your spacing even unless you have a pair of pieces, like this pair of pears. Now when you have a pair like this you want to hang it either at the top or you want to stack them on top of each other like this, no zagging. When you zag, it looks like you just missed, you don't want to do that.
Also, when you have a pair like this, often you might have three or four, you want to hang no more than half the distance of the piece apart. Please don't strand them, divorce is ugly in people, it's really scary in your artwork. Buy no more than three by any given artist or you are going to be out of walls and out of money, unless they are very small and then you can reach that. But you will find that your next favourite is always right around the corner, so leave some room.
Art inspires every day. Lead an art filled life. Celebrate your life, your home. Live well and beautifully.
