Art around a television, without it looking like an afterthought.

Conventions, not rules. The proportions here are what galleries and interior designers have settled on because they work in most rooms. They are a starting point, not a law.

Why directly above usually fails

Three reasons, and they compound.

• It forces the art too high. A television is mounted for seated viewing, so its top edge is often around 120–130 cm. Leave a sensible gap above that and the centre of your artwork lands near 160 cm or higher — well above the 145 cm that the eye expects. It reads as floating.
• The TV wins anyway. Whatever you hang is competing with a bright moving object directly beneath it. When the screen is on, nobody sees the art; when it is off, the art is stranded above a black slab.
• Heat and cables. Equipment vents upward, and the gap above a screen is where the cable run tends to be.

What works instead

Flank it

A tall, narrow piece on each side, hung so their centres line up with the centre of the screen. The arrangement now reads as one horizontal composition with the TV in the middle, rather than as a TV with something perched on top. Portrait A3s or A2s are the natural shape — you want height, not width, because the wall either side of a mounted TV is usually narrow.

Match the visual weight to the screen. A 165 cm-wide television flanked by two A4s looks like an accident; the same TV flanked by two A2s looks deliberate.

Put it on a ledge below

If the TV sits on a unit, a couple of leaning prints on that unit, overlapping slightly and offset to one side, break up the rectangle without competing for the wall. This is the easiest option and the hardest to get wrong.

Surround it

The salon approach: a dense cluster of smaller frames filling the wall around the screen so the TV becomes one dark element among many rather than the subject. It genuinely works, it takes the most planning, and the layouts guide has the measurements. Keep the frames all one colour or the wall becomes noise.

Move the TV off the feature wall

Worth saying because it is the answer people rule out before considering it. If the television is on the wall the room is oriented around, everything else on that wall is negotiating with it. On a side wall, it stops being the problem.

Glare, which decides the material

The wall behind and around a television is usually opposite a window, because that is where the seating faces. That makes it the most reflective wall in the house, and it settles a question people otherwise agonise over:

• Matte paper, unglazed or with matte glazing. It scatters light instead of bouncing it, so the image survives at the angles you actually sit at.
• Standard glass is the worst choice here. In a room lit for watching television it becomes a mirror of the lamp behind you.

This is one of the few situations where the cheaper option is also the better one.

Colour, next to a black rectangle

A dark screen is a large area of near-black in the composition whether you like it or not, so work with it. Artwork with some genuine depth in it — a deep ink, a charcoal, a bottle green — picks the screen up and makes it read as intentional. Pale, low-contrast work beside a black slab just makes the slab louder.

The other half of this is the room, not the TV. Run the matcher over a photograph taken from where you sit and take the palette from the sofa and the walls; the screen will look after itself.

The short version

1. Don't hang above the TV unless the top edge is below about 110 cm.
2. Flank it with two portrait pieces, centres aligned with the screen centre.
3. Scale to the TV, not to the wall.
4. Matte, not glass.
5. Something with real depth of tone, so the black reads as part of it.