Lighting Art with Museum Expertise

As experienced lighting equipment suppliers, AKZU and LightCraft understand the crucial role of lighting in showcasing artwork, whether in a museum or a private residence. The final step in the art exhibition process is often overlooked, yet it is vital in ensuring that the true essence and beauty of the artwork are revealed to the viewer.

Proper lighting reinforces the inherent value of the artwork, allowing colors to pop, eyes in portraits to peer back, and subtle variations in shade and hue to be fully appreciated. Good lighting distinguishes the art from its surroundings, drawing the viewer's attention and doing justice to the artist's vision.

When it comes to illuminating artwork, the light source is a crucial element. LED lights have become the industry standard, offering improved quality and energy efficiency. However, it is essential to invest in reputable brands catering to the museum industry, such as Soraa and Cree, to ensure consistent performance and longer lifespan.

While incandescent and halogen bulbs can produce good and consistent color, they generate significant heat that can be detrimental to the artwork. Fluorescent lights, on the other hand, often deliver poor color quality and emit excessive UV radiation, making them a less desirable option.

Ultimately, the choice of lighting equipment depends on the specific characteristics of the artwork and its location. By understanding the key factors, such as color quality (CRI), color temperature, beam angle, and luminosity, lighting professionals can ensure that the artwork is presented in the best possible light, allowing the viewer to fully engage with and appreciate the artist's creation.

Color Quality (CRI)

The color rendering index (CRI) is an important metric for evaluating the quality of lighting products, particularly for applications involving art or other color-critical tasks. While many consumer lights claim to produce "white" light, the spectrum they emit can significantly impact how colors appear.

Lights with a limited color spectrum may struggle to faithfully render rich, vibrant colors and subtle color variations. This is known as poor color fidelity. The CRI score, which ranges from 0 to 100, assesses how closely a light source's color rendering matches that of a reference light source (natural daylight).

For artwork and other color-critical applications, it is recommended to select lighting with a CRI of at least 90. This ensures the full spectrum of colors is accurately represented, preserving vibrancy and nuance. Manufacturers should clearly provide the CRI rating for their products - if this information is not available, it may be prudent to consider alternative options that prioritize color quality.

By understanding and specifying lighting with high CRI, lighting equipment suppliers can help their clients create visually compelling environments that faithfully render the intended colors and aesthetics.

Color Temperature

Color temperature is a measure of the warmth or coolness of white light, ranging from warm yellow tones at lower temperatures to cooler blue tones at higher temperatures. This has important implications for how artwork and interior spaces are perceived under different lighting conditions.

Warmer color temperatures around 2700K are well-suited for accentuating warm tones and creating a softer, more inviting ambiance. Cooler 3000K light has a slightly sharper quality that can help bring out blues, greens, and high contrast.

Consistency in color temperature is crucial - using lamps with mismatched temperatures in the same space can create a disjointed, clashing effect. By carefully selecting the appropriate color temperature, lighting designers and suppliers can optimize the aesthetic and functional qualities of illumination for their clients.

Ultimately, color temperature is a valuable tool for lighting professionals to understand and utilize in order to achieve the desired visual impact and atmosphere within a space.

Beam Angle and Luminosity

We handled over 2000 prestigious museum and gallery projects, we understand the importance of beam angle and luminosity when strategically lighting artwork. Unlike the omnidirectional light of traditional bulbs, the best fixtures for artwork use unidirectional lamps that can be precisely aimed and focused.

The beam angle describes the shape and coverage of the emitted light, ranging from narrow spotlights under 20° to wide floods over 35°. Spotlights are great for small pieces and 3D objects, regular floods between 20-35° work well for medium to larger framed works, and wide floods over 35° are ideal for large works and walls.

Luminosity, measured in lumens, is the absolute light output, but can be deceiving. That output is spread by the beam angle and distance, so lamps with the same luminosity can appear quite different in brightness. Wider floods will appear dimmer than tight spots, so you'll need brighter flood fixtures to maintain even illumination across a space.

Understanding the interplay of beam angle and luminosity is crucial when designing a cohesive and effective lighting plan for artwork. Let me know if you have any other questions!

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Putting Lights up and Lighting the Art

Adjustable track lighting, the ideal situation…

If you are working in a gallery space or can add lighting according to the locations of your artwork, track lighting with interchangeable fixtures that can be focused in any direction will give you the most flexibility for achieving ideal illumination. There are all sorts of slim and handsome track lighting systems on the market, and one can likely be found to meet your aesthetic and/or budgeting needs. The tracks should be parallel to the walls on which art will be hung and nearly as long. The distance tracks are installed from the install wall should be enough to avoid raking the art—that is shining light from a very sharp angle close to the picture plane—yet close enough to pass over the average viewer’s head; an angle of 30°- 40° from the wall should work.

Light and track placement about 30°- 40° from the wall lights the work evenly while avoiding bouncing glare and shadows of viewers heads.

Lighting the Art:

Knowing your overall design of a room or gallery is always the first step to lighting the artwork; this is where you set the mood and choose the kind of lamps and fixtures you’ll use. There are typically two extremes of mood found in museums and galleries: contemporary and dramatic. Both offer lessons for lighting artwork in any situation, and most installations fall somewhere in the middle.

‘Contemporary’ lighting is marked by complete and even washes of cool light throughout the installation space and is typically used for Modern and contemporary art. There are two ways to achieve this. One is to use very wide floods as wall washers at regular intervals to evenly light every inch of wall. The other, if one is really committed to this look, is to install LED tube lighting (instead of fluorescent), in long lines along the perimeter of the space. Contemporary style has little variation in lamp type and needs little maintenance as it tends to be a one-size-fits-all strategy.

Dramatic lighting involves putting tight spots of light over the artwork in a dark room—think Caravaggio as interior designer—and tends to be found with antiquities and old masters. Spotlights and regular floods tightly focused on the art will do nearly all the work lighting the room, and warmer color temperatures tend to look better. If there is not enough light bounce from these spots to make the room navigable, dim wide floods can be used to bring up walls and floors to balance out the room. This mood requires a reevaluation of the lighting every time a piece is moved, so is both labor and lamp intensive.

The middle approach tends to be the most practical and easy on the eyes. The room should first be lit evenly and look comfortable on its own using wide floods at regular intervals. Then spots and regular floods come in to bring up the levels on just the artwork, creating subtle highlights on the pieces. This strategy means moving artwork doesn’t disrupt the whole lighting plan and pieces still get a nice alluring bump of brightness. The color temperature can be tailored to the colors in the artwork, furniture, paint, or just plain preference, but should remain constant across the different lamps.

Whether you are creating subtle highlights or dramatic illumination, how you go about lighting an artwork can make a big difference by both highlighting features and hiding defects. The shape, size, texture, and material of a piece will tell you how to light it, and here are some strategies to begin with.

  

         

Works on Paper

It’s important to remember that not all flat art is truly flat. Works on paper, be they prints, drawings, or photos, tend to have little important surface texture, but sometimes there are undesirable wrinkles, creases, and bows. It’s best to light works on paper relatively straight on, or at a right angle from the wall. Direct light has a flattening effect, so any flaws won’t stand out. However, sometimes lighting larger glazed pieces from the center creates a distracting reflection in the glass. Splitting the light source, described next, can solve that.

  

         

Paintings

Larger paintings and those with heavy impasto benefit from angled light coming from both sides. For the example of a five-foot-wide painting, take two regular flood lights, spread them each about a foot outside the edges of the canvas, and focus them on their opposite portion of the picture (right light points to left part of painting, and vice versa). The uneven surface catches the angled light and makes a subtle mix of highlights and shadow that accentuates the texture and activates the surface, all while looking evenly lit.

For large and textured paintings, cross lighting works well to accentuate surface detail and give even coverage.

Very Small Works:

Very small works and books beckon the viewer to look closely, which introduces their head as a major obstruction to good lighting. Regardless of the material or texture, your strategy will be to get around the viewer. With track lighting behind the viewer, you may be forced to aim over the viewer’s shoulder with narrow spotlights at sharp angles to the wall, much like the strategy for lighting paintings but with raking light on a smaller target.

Sculptures

The possibilities of shape and size of 3D art make a standard lighting solution impossible, but here are a few tips. Consider how one might approach the artwork and establish front from back, then light the front from over the viewer’s shoulders. Avoid putting lights in the eyes of people walking into the room or looking at the piece—entering a room and looking into a beam of light can be disorienting and unpleasant. If ambient light does well enough at evenly lighting a piece, then a modest spotlight from directly above can add some interesting highlights and activate the surface—this is particularly effective with busts, vases, and anything with lots of surface detail.

 

Trust Your Eye

Truthfully, a comprehensive guide for lighting artwork can’t really exist. There are simply too many physical and technical variables playing into what is ultimately an aesthetic situation. It helps to understand the technical characteristics of your tools and have a few strategies in your pocket to begin with, but it comes down to what looks good to you in the long run. Try to start with the big picture by establishing what the mood and focus of a room will be, gather the lamps and fixtures you think you’ll need to achieve that, and then work out the details for each piece by looking generously and coaxing all the best parts of the art into the light. This will help you achieve a balanced room with well-lit artwork to be enjoyed fully without deficit or distraction.

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