Sea of Glass: The One That Belongs in a Bathroom

The sea in most coastal photographs has texture — waves, foam, movement. It's what makes the ocean read as the ocean.

Here there's almost none. A long exposure has flattened the water into an unbroken turquoise plane that curves into warm sand without a hard line between them. The result doesn't quite look like a photograph and doesn't quite look like a painting, which is why it holds attention longer than it should.

There's no drama in it at all. That's the appeal, and it's also why it works in rooms where a dramatic piece would be exhausting.

Bathrooms are the most underused art walls in a house. People treat them as utility and hang nothing, or hang something apologetic.

It's the wrong instinct. A bathroom is a small enclosed room where someone stands still and looks at one wall for several minutes a day — better conditions for looking at a picture than most living rooms offer. Coastal work belongs there more honestly than it does over a sofa, and a calm, wet, turquoise image is about as at home as art gets.

The only practical caveat: keep it off the wall that takes direct shower spray, and run an extractor. Canvas in a well-ventilated bathroom is fine.

Vertical. In a bathroom, 20 × 25″ or 24 × 30″ is usually right — the wall is short and the viewing distance is a metre. In a bedroom, 32 × 40″ and up.

White or oak. White is the crisp choice next to tile and suits a bathroom exactly; oak warms the sand and works better in a bedroom. Unframed keeps it soft. Black is wrong for this palette — it puts a hard edge on an image built entirely out of soft ones.