Hanging a Few Masterpieces Way Up in a Black Mountain Stairwell

Stairwells can be a wonderful place to display art, because they often include a tall empty wall that's visible from several rooms. But they can be tricky to hang art in... unless you don't mind heights.

And we don't!

We recently had the pleasure of installing some really wonderful art in a home in Black Mountain that had a beautiful two-story stairwell. The homeowner had requested a gallery wall layout, so we started by laying out paper templates:

Then once the homeowners had confirmed that they liked the layout, we installed the pictures. This was definitely a two-person job, because they were large pieces that had to be carefully handed up the ladder. And it was a very tall wall, with limited access even with our special stairwell ladders.

But it was worth it. I particularly liked this grouping because it was all in neutral tones. There were several really interesting grave rubbings from England...

... and this striking work by Käthe Kollwitz, called ​The Scythe Sharpener.

Kollwitz's biography makes an interesting read; she was an abstract expressionist who was threatened with the concentration camp by the Nazis; and yet they also used one of her pieces for their own propaganda. I had seen her work before in important art history books before and always admired the brutal simplicity of her forms, so I really enjoyed seeing this work in person. The expressiveness of the figure's hands is so compelling!

Across the stairwell was another grouping of more colorful pieces, which made it an interesting experience to climb the stairs. The groupings seemed to bounce off each other, if that's the way to put it.

These were particularly intriguing from the living room, where you could see the red shining through the balusters.

The homeowners had already hung the gray drawing of the pensive woman. This was one of the first pieces in their collection, and they said they liked it because she appears to float in space. I also really enjoyed her expression, which is exactly the bored, daydreaming look that a model gets when she poses for an artist for a long time.

Further down the stairs they had a little Goya depiction of a bullfight. He was such a master at transmuting something terrible into... something else.

It seems to me that everyone has a few pieces that they cherish, sometimes because they're rare and valuable, and other times for purely aesthetic or sentimental reasons. No matter why you love your art, we'll treat it with the same care and attention that you would use.

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