The question people ask when they hesitate in front of one of my canvases is almost never “do I like it”. It is: “will it work in my home?”
It is a good question. A painting is not looked at the way a photograph on a screen is. It occupies a wall, it lives with a certain light, a sofa, a ceiling height, a wall colour. A size of 80 × 80 cm means nothing until you have seen it above your own sideboard.
That is why I built, on this site, a tool that exists almost nowhere else: you can place my canvases on your own wall, at their true scale, from a single photo taken with your phone.
How it works
You open a work, tap “See it in your home”, and take a photo of the wall you have in mind — or pick one already on your phone.
Then comes the only step that needs a little care: giving the scale. You point at two places in the photo whose real distance you know — the width of a window, the height of a door, the length of a sofa — and you enter that measurement in centimetres. Everything else is calculated: the canvas appears at its true size in your room. A 40 × 40 looks like a 40 × 40, and a 100 × 100 fills the wall exactly as it will.
You can then move it, place two or three side by side, try a frame, compare two sizes, and save your wall to come back to it later or show it to someone.
Your photo never leaves your device
This matters, so I would rather say it straight away: the photo of your home stays on your device. It is not uploaded to any server, it is not sent to me, and it is stored nowhere but in your own browser. The calculation happens on your side.
You are photographing your living room, not mine. There is no reason for me to see it.
What the tool shows honestly — and what it does not
A simulator that promises too much becomes useless, so let me be precise.
What it shows well: size. That is where the gap between what one imagines and what is real is widest, and it causes most of the disappointment on delivery. It also shows the balance of a multi-canvas hanging, and the relation between a painting and the furniture around it.
What it approximates: colour. Your screen, the light in your room at night, the light in a photo taken in the morning — three different lightings. A reproduction will never render the depth of a layer of acrylic, nor the relief of the matter.
What it does not show at all: presence. That is the right word, and I cannot simulate it. A canvas has a thickness, a texture, traces of the gesture that you only perceive close up. Many of my paintings are discovered differently depending on distance: from afar a scene appears; close up, the eye meets mostly strokes, traces and colours.
The simulator is there to rule out the wrong answers, not to replace the encounter with the painting.
One word on hanging height
Since you are standing in front of your wall: the simplest rule, and the one the tool follows, is to place the centre of the work about 150 cm from the floor. That is average eye level, the height museums use. Above a piece of furniture, leave at least 10 to 15 cm between the top of the furniture and the bottom of the work — without that gap the two visually stick together, and the painting looks as though it were resting on the sideboard rather than hanging on the wall.
With very high ceilings you can go up a little, but less than you would think: a painting hung too high is no longer looked at, it is endured.
Try it now: choose a canvas in the gallery and tap “See it in your home”. It takes two minutes, and then you know. If you are torn between two sizes, write to me — that is exactly the kind of question I am glad to answer.