Artwork & Picture Lighting

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 offer 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 they also emit heat.   Whilst in the past these were as good as you could get, now they are not recommended.

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.  LEDs 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.

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.

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 homes or 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.