Kitchen & Dining room

A kitchen already has food in it, and that single fact makes choosing art for it unlike any other room. Hang a picture of food on a kitchen wall and it competes with the real thing two metres (6 ft) away, in better colour. So of the eleven prints here, exactly one depicts something edible — a Mediterranean sardine painting — and that is deliberate rather than an oversight. The rest is foliage and abstract work: beige and brown brush-stroke sets of two and three, a terracotta abstract pair, a potted palm, navy and beige leaf prints, a blue hydrangea, a teal abstract flower, a floral vase study and a pair of pink roses.

The sardines are the exception that proves the rule, and they belong on a dining wall rather than over a hob. A fish painting beside a table reads as appetite and a bit of wit. The same picture above the cooking reads as instruction.

All eleven are print-and-ship only — there is no digital download on this page — on heavy matte paper, unframed, in seven sizes from 5x7 in (12.7 x 17.8 cm) to 16x20 in (40.6 x 50.8 cm). Singles are about CA$14–47, pairs about CA$26–84 and sets of three about CA$38–124.

Where does art actually fit in a kitchen?

On the wall that does no work: the run above a sideboard, the end of a galley, the strip beside a doorway, the breakfast nook. A kitchen gives up very little free wall, so the realistic choice is usually one small print at standing eye level rather than an arrangement, and 8x10 in (20.3 x 25.4 cm) earns its place where 16x20 in (40.6 x 50.8 cm) would simply be in the way. The dining half of the room is where the sets belong.

Will cooking damage a print hung in a kitchen?

Grease is the real risk, not heat. Cooking puts a fine oily film into the air that settles on every surface in the room, and once it is on open paper it does not come off. Keep anything unframed out of the splash arc of the hob and the sink, and if it has to hang in the working half of the room, put it behind glass or acrylic. On a dining wall across the room, none of this matters.

How does a pendant over the table change what to choose?

A dining pendant points down at the table, not out at the wall, so the wall behind it sits in the dimmer part of the room all evening. Pale, low-contrast work disappears there. The terracotta pair, the brown and beige brush strokes and the teal flower all keep their shape in that light because the gap between their darkest and lightest areas is wide. A very soft study does not. If the room is lit mainly by a pendant, choose the stronger picture and hang the quiet one where the daylight is.

Nearby: neutral prints for the beige and sand end of this, terracotta prints for more of the warm abstracts, and coastal art where the sardines came from.