What makes a painting a good phone wallpaper

A painting is made to be seen whole, on a wall. A phone shows a tall strip of it, a hand's length away, with the clock and a grid of icons on top. This is what I look for in that strip.

The crop

A phone screen is 9:16. Cut to that shape, a wide landscape keeps about a fifth of the canvas. On Heade's “Sunlight and Shadow: The Newbury Marshes”, the wallpaper is 21% of the painting. I place every crop by hand, and a painting gets in when some part of it works as a wallpaper, whatever the rest of it shows.

Quiet surfaces

This is the rule I hold to most. Icons get lost on heavy brushstrokes and fine, busy detail, so I look for smooth, blended painting. I also measure each crop for how much the brightness jumps where the icons sit.

Taste

I prefer dark paintings because I think they look better on a phone, though you can set the clock to any colour. Every work also comes in a dimmed version, darker and less colourful. There are no portraits, also by preference.

Some works here break these rules. Audubon’s birds are bright and busy on cream paper, and Haeckel’s shells are busier still. They're here because I liked them.