Wisteria wall art is trailing bloom as archival prints, not poster reproductions. Conservatories, bedrooms and hallways suit the hanging racemes. Browse the Wisteria Garden collection when you are ready to buy.
| 6 works · 1 artist · 5 sizes · from £52.50 |
A hanging subject inside a square frame
Wisteria grows downward. The raceme hangs, sometimes half a metre of it, and that fall is the entire compositional character of the subject — it is one of the few garden plants whose main axis is vertical.
Which makes Cathryn Baldock's decision here worth noticing: every one of these works is square. The obvious move with a hanging subject is a tall portrait crop that follows the drop. She does the opposite, and sets the fall inside a square where it has nowhere to go. The racemes run out of the top of the frame and are cut off at the bottom, so the picture implies a longer fall than it shows. A portrait crop would have contained the whole flower and made it a specimen. The square keeps it a curtain.
The practical consequence is that these are much easier to place than the subject suggests. A square picture is the most forgiving shape there is — it does not need a tall wall, it does not need a wide one, and it sits comfortably above furniture of almost any proportion.
The six works
Wisteria Garden 1 is the one with movement in it: trailing racemes in soft lilac and white caught in diagonal motion blur, so the flowers become streaks of colour rather than distinct blooms. It is the least literal of the six and the closest to abstraction.
Wisteria Garden 12 hangs racemes down both sides of the frame with fresh green foliage between them, the blooms ranging from near-white to deep violet. It is the most symmetrical and the easiest to live with.
Wisteria Garden 10 and Wisteria Garden 13 are the two that include architecture — weathered stone columns, a flagstone terrace, the wisteria draping over built structure rather than floating free. They are the pair to choose if you want the picture to read as a place rather than as a plant, and they are the two that will sit most naturally in a room with stone, brick or old timber in it.
Wisteria Garden 2 and Wisteria Garden 5 are the densest studies in the set: racemes cascading across the full frame in an unbroken curtain of lilac and soft purple, sharply focused at one edge and dissolving across the rest. They carry the most colour of the six and want the most space around them.
Mauve is more forgiving than people expect
Wisteria sits in a narrow band of mauve, lilac and soft violet, and people avoid it because they think of it as a difficult colour to put in a room.
It is not, because it sits between warm and cool and shifts with the light. Under warm evening lamps it reads pink and soft. In north-facing daylight it reads grey-violet and cool. That range is why it works in more rooms than a fixed colour would — and it is also why you should look at a shortlist in the room's own light rather than deciding from a screen.
It also means these do not need a room built around them. Mauve is close enough to neutral at this saturation that it will sit against white, grey, warm stone or pale green without argument. The one thing it fights is a strong yellow.
Two or three together
Because every work is square and every one is the same subject in the same palette, this is one of the easier sets to hang as a group. Two side by side at equal spacing, or three in a row, both work without any further thought about balance.
The pairing that does the most is one architectural and one floating — Wisteria Garden 10 or 13 next to 1 or 12 — because the columns give the eye something solid to rest against and the soft one reads as air beside it. Two of the dense studies together is a great deal of lilac in one place.
Where it belongs
Conservatories and garden rooms first, where the subject echoes what is outside the glass. Bedrooms second: the narrow tonal range and soft palette read as restful, and a square picture suits the wall beside a bed better than a tall one does.
Kitchens work for the closer studies, where the high-key blooms cut through pattern and hard surfaces. The room to be careful with is a study or a home office — the racemes are gentle rather than demanding, and on a wall you face while working they recede before you have finished looking.
Framing soft colour
Keep the frame pale and quiet. A dark moulding around a soft mauve subject puts a hard edge around something that has none, and the contrast fights the image rather than supporting it. Oak and light wood belong to the same tonal family as the flower and disappear into it.
Use a mount, and use a wide one if the size allows. These images run to the edge of the frame with no natural border of their own, and a mount supplies the breathing space the composition does not contain. A neutral white or off-white rather than a tinted mount — a warm mount pushes the mauve pink and a cool one pushes it grey, and you lose the shift with the light that is the best thing about the colour.
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