What makes a sculpture ideal for display inside a regular home?
Decorating our walls with drawings and paintings has been the norm for decades, but more and more people are now choosing to add three-dimensional artworks to their homes as well.
This type of art has many benefits over traditional wall art and can be one of the quickest ways to highlight your tastes and personality. Choosing the right piece can be challenging, however, as sculpture has traditionally been the reserve of environments such as museums, galleries, and sculpture parks.
Surveys have repeatedly shown that most people’s first thoughts, when questioned about sculpture, are the large-scale bronze or stone statues found in city parks, the ornate busts found in locations such as museums and the Oval Office, or oversized outdoor artworks that are clearly unsuitable for the rooms of a typical home. You will need to break free from these thoughts when choosing the right sculptures with which to decorate your home.
Size and Scale
Sculptures can be expensive, and, unsurprisingly, their cost will often be tied to the scale of the artwork and thus the number of materials required to create it. Smaller sculptures tend to be cheaper and are naturally more suited to the home environment at the same time. If the artwork you choose is far too large or small, it will seem out of place in the room where it is displayed.
Larger homes with huge entryways make ideal places to position three-dimensional artworks but may also require a bigger sculpture if it is to act as a successful focal point for the room.
There are no exact rules for matching the size and scale of a piece of art to a room, but you certainly don’t want something so large that it becomes an obstruction. At the same time. sculpture often works best if it can be viewed from all angles. For these reasons, check and consider the dimensions carefully before you buy, especially when buying sculptures online.
Color and Tone
Artwork is often designed to attract attention, but, paradoxically, it will often work best if it blends in well with its surroundings as well. The material used to construct a sculpture can sometimes restrict the available colors, but small-scale sculptures come in a wider range of tones than those designed for the rugged outdoor environment.
If the sculpture you wish to buy is not designed to be free-standing, the color of the pedestal or other piece of furniture on which it is displayed can be used to enhance or mute the contrast between the color of the sculpture, and the colors of your floor and walls.
A bronze sculpture will look great against a blue or green backdrop, particularly if displayed on a wooden pedestal, perhaps with a cream-colored base. If you are unsure of which colors will look best together, online tools such as color wheels can help when deciding which shades and tones will complement one another, and which will clash.
Positioning
Like the previous two considerations, there are two important aspects to positioning a sculpture as well. Firstly, choosing the right position within the room is key to ensuring your new artwork looks its best. Complex sculptures look best when placed in the direct center of a room, enabling it to be viewed from all sides with ease.
Where this isn’t possible, you can also position your piece on an open corner providing it doesn’t limit maneuverability in that area. Placing your sculptures in these locations, where they do not have an immediate backdrop, will often allow you to be more creative in your choice of color and tone.
The second aspect of positioning relates specifically to sculptures that are not free-standing and are designed to be placed on top of something else. Where this applies, you should consider the viewing angles that are provided by the base piece of furniture.
If a sculpture is painted or decorated on one side, it should be placed on a bookshelf or chest of drawers that is mounted against a wall. You should also aim to choose a piece of furniture that will position the sculpture as close to eye level as possible.
Last Words
The three primary considerations we have just discussed can sometimes be enough to correctly display a sculpture within your home, but other aspects can sometimes crop up, too.
An excellent example of this is environmental considerations such as lighting – how will the sculpture appear during the day when it is lit by the light from your windows, compared to on a night when the lights are on? It might be best to choose a position where you can use a backlight or under light, positioned specifically to enhance the look of your new artwork.
