All artwork benefits from sympathetic lighting, but great artwork deserves something truly special. Lighting artwork is a specialist area and we use a variety of different technologies and lighting design techniques to deliver wholly bespoke lighting for fine art collections and individual treasures.
There is no single ‘best’ way of lighting art: the most appropriate route depends on the type of art (its style and medium), size of the artwork, its setting, and the fixing points available for the light fittings. There are also considerations around how often the artwork changes, and of course how much light is needed and/or is desirable.
All light damages paintings to a greater or lesser extent: if the paintings are precious – and particularly if they are watercolours – then from a light perspective the best way to keep them is in the dark. However in order to see paintings and to derive pleasure from them they need light. The light sources used should therefore be the least damaging and very controllable, both to control the amount of light that falls on the painting and the duration that the light is on.
So what are some of the options?
The traditional picture light has been around for decades with incandescent, halogen, fluorescent, and more recently LED light sources being used for lighting artwork. Each source has its own characteristics and issues.
Historically, incandescent lamps were the predominant light source used: they give a warm glow and accentuate reds and golds rather than blues and greens, but overall they offered better colour rendering than fluorescent and most LED sources. However, incandescent and halogen sources are inefficient and can damage the artwork. Unless filtered they emit ultra-violet (UV) light, and worse, they also emit heat. Incandescent picture lights have had their day.
As LED sources have come in (either LED lamps, or dedicated 24v LED picture lights), these offer benefits around reduced UV and heat, but often they have very poor colour rendering. Poor quality LED lights are generally very bad at rendering reds and strong blues: both of which tend to be quite important in artwork as they make up skin tones, shadows etc. Without a full spectrum of light paintings will appear flat and dull (or at worst, bilious and unpleasant).
Regardless of the light source, traditional picture lights work best with small pictures only as they simply don’t ‘throw’ the light: we are all familiar with larger paintings with a hotspot at the top, and a completely dark bottom.
The ArtView LED picture light was born out of a need to light large canvases. It addresses the issues associated with traditional picture lights – uneven light coverage, poor quality light, high energy consumption and harmful UV emissions – whilst looking perfectly in keeping with both traditional and modern interiors. It also adds the potential for a remarkable degree of control for each individual picture.
Innovative use of optics and filters allows us to tune each fitting to a canvas’ size, material and tones giving consistent light and colour rendering. We work with the ArtView to deliver wholly bespoke lighting for fine art collections or individual treasures.
The ArtView has had such incredible feedback that we now have complementary solutions for much smaller pictures too so the range works comfortably together.
Picture lights aren’t the only option for lighting artwork. Angled downlights can be a discreet alternative and can give a wonderful result when lighting groups of pictures where traditional picture lights simply wouldn’t fit. A downlight gives a different effect with more of a cone of light, but it can be very effective where the picture is the focal point and a little wider ambient light is desirable.
Framing projectors are a different approach to lighting pictures or sculpture. Less commonly seen in residential situations, framing projectors provide a way to frame art with no light spill. See how this works with one of our reference pictures seen here.
There are broadly two routes, with very different advantages, disadvantages and costs.
Surface mounted picture framing projector
These are essentially like mini theatre lights, with shutters to frame any straight sided shape. They are relatively inexpensive compared to other projector options and because they are surface mounted they don’t have particular build or accessibility constraints. They are best set up professionally but can be set up by the end user. Working out the angles of reflectance before the wiring is done is very important. They look fabulous in more industrial/gallery style locations, but probably aren’t the right route in a period setting.
Ceiling recessed framing projector
These need to be professionally set up, and can be designed to frame any shape. They are a serious investment in kit and design and commissioning expertise. In order to make them very discrete from the room side they need both a deep void space to sit in and access from above to facilitate lamp changing and maintenance.
Since developing the ArtView picture light we have found that we use considerably fewer framing projectors; in side by side testing the ArtView is often the preferred option. However every situation is different and so framing projectors remain a valuable tool in our armoury.
This is a selection of projects featuring our bespoke approach to lighting fine artwork. For privacy reasons it’s often not possible to shoot the private art collections we have lit so we are indebted to the owners of the art collections seen here for allowing us to share them.
