What Nobody Tells You About Buying Black and White Wall Art

We bought one once for £40 that’s a close up shot of a grainy bridge cable. It’s in your Newcastle office and was purchased from a shop that doesn’t exist anymore. Someone else has one that cost four times as much and is literally just a photograph of nothing. A field, some fog, a horizon that you can’t quite see depending on the time of day. Someone will stop staring at the bridge photo thinking they’re looking at walls all day. The fog print makes people do that.

Right up until the one day a year when the light is perfect and someone comes stumbling in through the doorway, stops and legitimately asks where you got it from.

That sums it up really.

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Half of us believe that fog print is the better piece of art and always will be. Rewarding patience. Quiet little thing doing its job quietly. The other half believe a picture that only has one day, twelve if you’re lucky, where it looks how it’s meant to, has failed at literally its only job; to be looked at. Winner: cable photo, by being there for you like a mate who texts you back immediately.

No one will ever change their mind on this, three years in.

We will however concede that when it comes to black and white vs colour, black and white does one thing that wins every time. It fades into a room without actually fading into a room. It doesn’t fight the sofa. Or the cushions. Or whatever colour all the walls are decided to be that month. It just sits there minding its own business. Being right. Huge compliment but also sort of the problem? Because one too many people have walked into this office with convictions like that and bought a print because it was easy. Safe. Wouldn’t upstage the furniture. And then spent the next two years staring at something on their wall that they don’t really think about anymore. It dulls. Mutes itself to fit in. And art should shout. Actual art shouldn’t become furniture, that’s half the reason it’s art. But yes, we’ve reached wallpaper status on several walls now.

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We will not get into who likes what frames. Irreparable damage has been caused there and we’re never talking about it again. Briefly: one side likes black frames. Thin. Invisable. Gallery acting like it’s not a gallery. The other side loudly disagrees and want the frame to buck up its chin and actually do some of the heavy lifting when it comes to the print it’s wrestling with. Chunky.

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Oversized.

Dad joke level of too much.

Anyway.

How we interact with it once it’s hanging? Most of the time it goes like this: don’t see it for three weeks. Look at it on a random evening because you’re bored and haven’t really looked at it properly since it went up. Feels like new. That, right there. That’s the return on your investment if you’re going to be stingy about it. Sure, it can decorate your walls. But once in a while, it should make you look up.

We’ll let you know when the fog print has earned a day off.

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