Colorful wall art has a reputation for being the thing you buy when you don't know what else to do with a wall, and I understand why people think that, because a lot of it is loud for the sake of being loud. But a good piece of it, with real color in it rather than just a print of a trend, does something a quiet black and white frame can't, which is make a room feel like someone with a pulse lives there. I've come around on it slower than I'd like to admit, mostly because I spent a long time thinking color on a wall had to come from paint, not from something you hang on it.
What it sits well with is a room that already has some restraint in it, plain walls, wood furniture with some grain showing, a sofa in a solid color rather than a pattern. The art does the work of bringing in the color, so everything around it gets to be the quiet one. It earns its keep best in a den, a kitchen with some wall space over a table, a kid's room, a hallway that's otherwise dead space you walk through without looking at. Older houses with tall windows and good light suit it particularly well, because the light changes through the day and a strong color print will look different at nine in the morning than it does at five, which is more than you get from most things on a wall. It belongs in a home that's lived in year round rather than a place styled for one season, because unlike a seasonal wreath or a throw you swap out, you're looking at this one in January and July both.
Where it goes wrong is in a room already busy with pattern, a patterned rug, patterned curtains, a sofa with its own print, all fighting for the same attention, and nobody wins that fight, the room just looks tired. A well made piece has a print with real depth to the color, ink that sits flat and even with no banding, and a frame that's actually joined at the corners rather than stapled together from the back, because a cheap frame will warp within a year and the art inside will start to buckle against the glass. The cheap version looks fine in a photograph for about a week, and that's exactly the problem with buying on a photograph.
I'd put the first one in a hallway, where a plain wall has been waiting for a reason to stop being plain.
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