How to Hang Wall Art on Brick: A Painter's Guide to Fixings, Colour, and Light

♦ ♦ ♦ JULY 08, 2026 | 4 MIN READ How to Hang Wall Art on Brick: A Painter's Guide to Fixings, Colour, and Light At a Glance Brick holds far more weight than drywall, but it fixes and it lights a painting completely differently. Hang into the mortar joint, not the brick face, and choose work that can survive a warm, textured wall that edits its colour. The first time I set one of my own canvases against exposed brick, in a converted warehouse studio, I stood back and thought the colour had gone wrong overnight. It hadn’t. The wall was doing it. A whitewashed gallery wall stays out of the way. A brick wall never does. It is warm, it is uneven, and it has an opinion about everything you put in front of it. So before the question of how to hang wall art on brick becomes a hardware problem, know that it is also a colour problem and a light problem. I’ll take all three, because a painter and a hardware store look at this wall very differently. How to hang art on a brick wall without wrecking the wall Brick is generous with weight and unforgiving about where the hole goes. The mistake almost everyone makes is drilling the brick face. Brick spalls, it cracks, and the damage is permanent. The mortar joint is the soft, repairable part of the wall. Drill the mortar, not the brick. A masonry anchor set in the mortar line carries a framed painting easily; the OOK concrete and brick hanger is rated to 50 lb, which is more than most framed canvases in a home will ever weigh, and mortar can be repointed later as if nothing happened. If drilling is off the table, in a rental, a listed building, or a wall nobody wants to scar, steel brick clips solve it. They grip the lip of the brick where it stands proud of the mortar, and they need no drill, no screw, no adhesive. Picture Hang Solutions and OOK both make versions rated to 30 lb. The catch is built into the design: they only work on a recessed joint where at least a quarter of each brick protrudes beyond the mortar. Flush or overfilled pointing gives the clip nothing to bite. For anything heavier or wider, spread the load. Two or three clips, or a French cleat spanning several bricks, turns one point of stress into a shared one. It solves a second problem at the same time. Brick is rarely flat, so a single fixing lets the frame rock and stand proud with a shadow gap under one corner. A cleat levels the work against an uneven face while it hangs it. What a brick wall does to a painting’s colour and light Here is the part the hardware guide will never tell you. Brick is a colour. Reds, ochres, burnt oranges, the occasional cool grey, a whole warm field sitting behind the work. Painters have a name for what that does. Simultaneous contrast: set a colour against a warm surround and the eye cools it. Greens go muddy. Warm skin tones lose their blood. A painting mixed against a neutral studio wall reads a full step colder and greyer the moment it goes on brick. That is not a reason to avoid brick. It is a reason to ch