Red and Green - a complementary Composition in the Bedroom

Using complementary colours such as red and green in a room is always a bit tricky. If you choose this system, you might want to select a subtle colour and a dominant colour, to prevent the colors from clashing. In this room the red is very dominant - so we need a subtle green to make this really work. It was tried with a green toile used as a window drape but I think it is not enough. It is a bit off balance.

I have this photo on my computer since a long time and I always thought that I like this room somehow although I find the red walls a bit too prominent. But now I found the right solution with this painting, giving a bit more balance to the red walls and matching exactly the window drapes.

In the original photo a piece of wood carving or cast iron was chosen for decoration above the bed but this added quite a dull element to the room and did not change the imbalance in my opinion:

The painting itself belongs to my new series of paper works on heavy watercolour paper. It is called Green Marble - I painted a faux marble pattern as a basic background and added some hand printing with ancient Indian wooden print blocks from my collection in order to create a graphical element to the painting. Golden metallic pigments were added to create additional highlights to the graphical pattern. 

"Green Marble"
(from the Patterns series)
25" x 15", acrylic on paper
©Petra Voegtle

The nice thing with this painting is that you can hang it how you wish, vertically or horizontally...

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