The New Sanctuary: 5 Tips for Choosing Home Office Art

The home office is here to stay. For some time now, it has served as a safe place during uncertain times. In addition to the added flexibility of working from home, this new sanctuary presents the unique opportunity of choosing home office art that speaks to your taste and needs. When deciding how to style this blank canvas, there is much to consider. Let’s look at five tips to turn your home office into a space of inspiration, productivity, and peace.

How to Decorate a Home Office

Whether working on a small home office design or a larger space, the home office wall art you choose should help you through your workday. Many prefer office artwork that calms, while others opt for art that energizes and motivates. Some pieces can produce a single aim, while others combine several. To deliver the most optimal outcomes, your best bet is to ensure the room’s overall design achieves the vibe you desire.

1. Select a Theme 

Your home office wall art plays a big role in defining the space’s personality. By selecting pieces that work together to form an overall theme, you create an atmosphere that serves your needs best. Even if you love what you do, work is still work, and the grind is still the grind. Producing top-notch work on a daily basis is expected, and such expectations can lead to stress and anxieties that set us back.

To help counter these feelings, hang wall art that brings the outdoors indoors. A piece like Emerald Seas pictured here is the perfect example. With a bit of imagination, you can hear the jewel-colored waves crashing into the shore. You can smell the salt in the air and feel the ocean’s meditative pull. 

Looking a little closer, you can see the sun peeking through the overcast and piercing the wave creating an awe-inspiring sparkle. Where the rest of the ocean reflects the cloudy gray sky, this sunlit wave is a beautiful metaphor for life outside the demands of the nine-to-five.

2. Color Matters

We are lucky to live in a world with so much color. That said, the colors you choose for your home office art will directly affect the feel of the room.

Art in the traditional office often uses neutral colors to create a scene with little to no distraction. Apparently, the idea is that workers in a neutral-colored setting will be more productive. Many of us who have worked in traditional and home office settings will state that the opposite is true, and color psychology backs us up. A bright color like yellow stimulates the brain’s creativity, makes us more inquisitive, and uplifts the spirit. Still, one should use such a vibrant color sparingly as too much can have an overwhelming effect. 

Orange, a combination of yellow and red, combines the strength and liveliness of red with yellow’s feel-good nature to create an uplifting optimism perfect for the home office. And staring at the blue ocean, as noted in 9 Amazing Ways Coastal Artwork Fills Your Soul, can produce feelings of tranquility, happiness, and more. 

Dreamscape, the abstract ocean photograph pictured above, uses variations of these colors to create a vivid scene that strikes an ideal balance between calm and energized. An abstract piece like this also works to encourage imagination. Its color and wavy lines create a pleasant feeling of soft, rocking motion. This motion takes hold of our imagination and works to create space in our overcrowded minds. It reminds us that nothing can hold down our spirit while we’re required to stay put 40 hours a week.

Finally, abstract art could help take your mind off of complex work problems, so you can ultimately find the solution. Research shows that sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to stop thinking about it for a while. 

3. Use Nature to Inspire Creativity

In Transforming Your Home Office: Six Ways to Create Serenity in Your Home Office Space we discussed the importance of incorporating nature into your new office space. This could be plants, soothing scents like lavender, or alluring wall art for your home office like Palms Ablaze. Note how the rippled clouds introduce the fiery sunset over the calm waters of Kauai, Hawaii.

Hanging this gem in your office is like forming a window to a tropical wonderland where all things seem possible. Sure, creating sunsets is a bit beyond the capabilities of humankind, but we can use this inspiring scene to ignite our inspiration, creativity, and motivation in the workplace.

4. Take Me Away

One of the greatest things about work is when 5 p.m. rolls around. What’s even better than 5 p.m.? A relaxing vacation in paradise.

Since we spend so much time at work and so little on vacation, why not bring in big, epic reminders of your time away? Visiting a new place for the first time or returning to a beloved getaway touches something deep within us and restores the shine to our soul. Working a piece like Seaside Sunset into your modern home office design could help keep that soul glimmering.

Imagine hammering away at a demanding project in your home office. The deadline feels like it's approaching at warp speed, and you're not 100% sure what your boss wants exactly. You've been through this 1,000 times, so you know everything will work out, but what if there was a way to relieve some of the stress? 

Now imagine the same situation, but this time you look up at Seaside Sunset a few times an hour. The image brings you back to that trip to paradise. The memories of a worry-free week surround you and give you the motivation to power through the day.

5. Create Space for the Moment

A huge plus of working from home is how we can create the space necessary to appreciate the present moment. We form this space by quieting our discursive thoughts and setting aside an area to meditate. Both acts require that we let go of thoughts of the past and anxieties of the future so we can focus on the now.

While carving out a space in your home office for the meditation cushion is beneficial, it’s not necessary to experience the benefits of awareness. By becoming mindful of what occurs in each passing moment and taking note of your environment, you will realize many of the same benefits.

Observing your surroundings is a highly effective way to practice mindfulness. When we engage with a piece like Rainbow Eucalyptus Panoramic, we create space in our overcrowded minds. It’s easy to get lost in this photograph of colorful Rainbow Eucalyptus bark taken on the island of Kauai. But we’re not lost. We’re completely present with this wall art and the moment. Even spending five minutes a day in such a state can do wonders for the soul.

Now that you finally have the chance to decorate your own office, we’d love to help. When you have a sec, check out our photographic collections. If you see something that speaks to you or would like help finding something that does, please don’t hesitate to contact us online or by phone. We'd love the opportunity to help you select the home office wall art of your dreams.