I built this canvas wall art for living room collection around scale — 281 pieces from eight painters, most of them large enough to anchor a wall on their own without help from anything else in the room.

Editions and originals, side by side

The room splits cleanly in two. About half is limited-edition work — giclées from Vicente Romero (82 pieces), Anne Packard (58), Thomas Arvid (41) and Jia Lu (39), with editions running from as few as 38 copies, on Jia Lu's "Force of Creation," up to 460 on Thomas Arvid's "So Deserving." The other four painters work the opposite way: Gantner (39), Petras Lukosius (10), Jackie Ellens (7) and Maryam Moeeni (6) are one-of-a-kind originals on canvas, with no edition behind them at all. When one of those sells, that painting is gone — there is no second copy to order.

The subject matter splits these painters harder than the format does. Arvid paints wine — bottles, glasses, the reflections a good vintage throws across a table — in giclées signed and numbered by hand. Jia Lu paints figurative portraits of women in giclées like "Streaming Wind" and "Flying Veil." Lukosius's ten canvases, cubist in style, split between boats, nature scenes, and a single cityscape. Romero and Packard both work in coastal light, though Romero's Mediterranean figures and Packard's open dune scenes read nothing alike side by side, and Gantner rounds out the room with oil landscapes.

Prices run $395 to $7,350, median $1,799. If you're choosing a piece for a specific living room wall, scale matters more than anything else — stand where the sofa will be before you decide on a size, not in front of a screen. I'm happy to talk through what will actually read from across a room versus up close.

— Steve Schlag, founder, Dolphin Galleries