I’m not very good with decorating walls. I tend to find the irrevocability of pounding nails into them a little unsettling. That and commercial wall art can be so corny and expensive.

But somewhere I got this idea, I think from Casey, to accent a wall with a large piece of colorful textured paper. Almost three years and two bare-walled apartments later, I finally stopped by an art supply store on the walk home and picked up three large swathes of textured paper. They were only about $2-3/sheet, inexpensive and accessible enough to experiment and iterate.

I chose colors I thought were nice alone and together. Conveniently they resembled the colors of the furniture we have. Last weekend Stephanie and I alternated between holding them against a wall in various configurations while the other stood back and critiqued. In the end we opted for all three colors together.

We fixed the top corners to the wall with magic mounts, just to get them level and then sat down together to see how it all looked without hands holding them up. As we contemplated, a breeze from an open window across the room began to lift the paper off the wall in a most ethereal way.

We would have left them unmoored, except we knew they’d eventually tear off as we walked between the bathroom and the kitchen. After several minutes of watching the play of air on paper, we fastened the bottom corners to the wall.

In the future I’m thinking they may become canvases for other artworks or backdrops for framed photos.

Update: The art wall grows