When Less is Just Enough

One thing is certain, there is never a dull moment when it comes to designing a mural.

Case in point, this living room wall. Where did my intended wall stand? One wall of the room opened to the foyer and a staircase. The adjacent wall already featured a well organized collection of framed artwork that had been collected during travels by my clients. The third wall featured a colorful and dynamic watercolor that hovers between a deeply saturated palette of rich color with a hint of abstraction about it. Above the well appointed fireplace, it is the center of attention.

Which brings me to my wall. Hmmmmm…..

Enough art had been hung in the room and there was no need for a piece of furniture to fill this rather large wall. My space is about 9’ by 11’.

The solution, a background mural, if you will. A simple landscape, with plenty of detail but. Wait for it.

NO COLOR, and little contrast, meaning NO POP.

Color would have distracted the eye from the focal painting over the fireplace. Keeping the painting all monochromatic generally means I have a range of values to create dimension.  But such a large wall would also try to compete.

So, I took the distraction away. Instead of having a range of zero to ten (white is zero and black is ten), I cut my range to using a gray that sat right in the middle, a five.

I made several grays from that, all of them lighter. The fun really began when I treated the paint as a watercolor, getting lighter shades by adding water to dilute. Because my gray had been made from more than just black and white (it was rich in depth because I used some green, blue and umber in my creation of the starting gray), when I thinned it with different amounts of water, my strokes had different but related casts of gray, a delightful greenish gray, a sober brown gray and some clean wisps of blue gray. All these picked up on the fabrics in the furniture and the carpet.

This is me with a much lighter hand than I’m used to. No going over strokes to define. That would only make things darker and more rigid.

So take a look. Here’s the finished mural, first without furniture in front of it, and then from another angle.  I’ll follow with a few detail photos.

My clients are delighted with it. The designer, Dyane Prezioso, got exactly the muted landscape she requested. 

It has an ethereal quality that you can get lost in.

I’d love to know your thoughts.

By the way, I am still stealing hours to work with my oil paints. This painting was inspired by old photographs from the 1950s of time I spent with my family at Lake Zoar in Connecticut. This is of one of my cousins, entitled “No Crying at the Lake”.

 Decades later, her smile is still very much the same.