Art for the Dining Room

Framing available

Shiva and Nandi against a wash of burnt ochre, the whole canvas held in a narrow band of earth tones — rust, clay, muted saffron. There is almost no cool colour anywhere in it, which is unusual for the subject and gives the piece an enveloping warmth. Best on a pale wall, where the ochre can do its work without competition.

Framing available

Nine faces pressed into one plane, overlapping the way voices do in a crowded room. Each is resolved just enough to read as an individual before dissolving back into the pattern. The warm palette — rust, saffron, rose — keeps a busy composition from turning cold or clinical. A statement piece for a dining wall or a hospitality space.

Framing available

Yellow and violet blossoms lit as though from within, floating against a ground dark enough to read as night. The light is the subject rather than the flowers. Because the background is so deep, it holds its own on a dark or richly painted wall where a paler floral would disappear.

Framing available

A shallow bowl catching light at the centre of a dense wreath of red roses and dark foliage, painted with heavy impasto so the petals stand off the surface. Nearly baroque in its density. Needs a wall with some space around it and, ideally, light from the side to rake across the texture.

Framing available

A woman with her eyes closed and her head tipped back, ringed by sunflowers worked in thick palette-knife strokes. The paint is laid on heavily enough that the flowers read as physical objects on the canvas rather than images of flowers. The most tactile piece in the collection — worth seeing in raking light.

Framing available

An elderly man bent over a cup of tea, and behind him — with no explanation offered — the whole of a star field. The domestic and the cosmic put on the same plane without comment. The idea carries the piece, and it tends to be the one people ask about. Suits a dining room or a café wall where it will be looked at for a while.

Framing available

The companion to Chai Under the Stars, and the warmer of the two: a man in a saffron turban with two cups set out on the table in front of him, one of them plainly for someone who has not arrived. The nebula behind him is painted in reds rather than blues. The second cup is the whole story.