Marin County painter Erik Tiemens has taken part in every one of our annual Beloved California exhibits. We’ve mostly shown his oil paintings. But this year, for Beloved California IX, three of his four pieces are watercolor and gouache. “A Landscape from Memory” captures a pastoral valley and that wonderful effect of the sun bursting through after a rainstorm (something we just experienced today here in slightly less pastoral Berkeley). The frame is our No. 300 BC Low at 2-1/2″ wide. The shallow cove mimics the broad sweep of the valley. It’s in quartersawn white oak with Saturated Medieval Oak stain, and has a bronze slip.

Beloved California IX runs through the holidays, closing December 28. Come enjoy the inspired landscape views of Erik Tiemens and twenty-one other premier regional painters.

Erik Tiemens
“A Landscape From Memory”
watercolor and gouache on paper, 10 1/8″ x 14 1/8″. $3,400 framed.
BUY

Since the early days of the Monterey Peninsula artists’ colony, a certain mystical quality has lured painters to the area. Artists like Charles Rollo Peters accentuated that quality by painting the Peninsula in the moonlight. Kim Lordier‘s pastel “Point Lobos Magic” proves that the spell endures.

Framed in a 3-1/2″ wide stained oak cove profile with two carved elements: a cushion back edge and raised strap near the sight edge. Both of those elements have paint rubbed into them in the blue and green of the painting. A gilt slip adds the finishing touch.

“Point Lobos Magic” is just one of 63 paintings featured in Beloved California IX, our current all-gallery show celebrating the Northern California landscape. Kim was here last Saturday taking part in a well-attended and festive opening reception. She not only got lots of props, but sold another seascape—the 12″ x 16″ “Rolling In” (at right)—to a long-time fan.

Beloved California IX is on through December 28. Come and enjoy it!

Kim Lordier
“Point Lobos Magic”
Pastel on Archival Board, 24″ x 18″.
$6,800 framed.
BUY

Simon Addyman is an oil painter we’ve admired for a very long time, so it is wonderful to announce that he’s joined the roster of The Holton Studio Gallery. Simon will be featured in Beloved California IX, opening today. We expect Simon Addyman to be here for the reception from 2 to 4. Hope you can come too!

This is one of Simon’s I especially love. It’s called “Sunlit Trees.” The 10″ x 12″ is framed in a stained quartersawn white oak No. 1.4 CV—2″ with bronze slip.

Simon Addyman
“Sunlit Trees”
Oil on linen panel, 10″ x 12″. SOLD.

James McGrew called today with great news—he’s on the road from Zion National Park and headed our way, hoping to be here Saturday for the opening reception for Beloved California IX. But there could be a hitch: he’s going by way of Yosemite and it’s supposed to be snowing up there and might be too beautiful to leave! We’d sure love to see him here, but in any case, he’ll be present in spirit. The exhibition includes three of his Yosemite paintings, and two are exquisite snow scenes. “Sentinel Rock and Clearing Snow Storm,” 12″ x 9″, at right, graces the show’s postcard, in fact.

“Half Dome, Oxbow in Winter,” 8″ x 12″, below, is also an oil on linen on board. Its frame is a 2-1/4″ wide stained quartersawn white oak cove with carved elements at the sight edge and back edge and a white gold slip.

Please join us from 2 to 4 this Saturday, November 16, for the opening of “Beloved California IX: Twenty-Two Painters with a Passion for Place.” We’re expecting many of the artists—and hoping James makes it! But if we don’t see him we’ll rest assured he’s doing his part in celebrating our state’s incomparable beauty.

“Beloved California IX” will run through the end of the year, and will be online as well.

James McGrew painting Yosemite in the snow.

John Ruskin wrote that part of “the glory of a great picture” is that “it speaks with the voices of many; the efforts of thousands dead, and their passions, are in the pictures of their children today. Not with the skill of an hour, nor of a life, nor of a century, but with the help of numberless souls, a beautiful thing must be done.”* As a student of art in London during Ruskin’s day, it’s quite likely that the English artist Charles W. Bartlett (1860 – 1940) absorbed, directly or indirectly, the great art critic’s insight; in any case he practiced its wisdom. In 1913, Bartlett and his wife traveled to Asia, arriving in Japan in 1915. There he met Watanabe Shōzaburō, the great woodblock publisher, and benefited from the expertise of not only the master but the numerous carvers and printers he employed. Watanabe was the driving force of the Shin-Hanga movement—which he named—to revive the artistic efforts of those “numberless souls” who had contributed over centuries to Japan’s great ukiyo-e tradition.

A couple of years ago I posted about framing this Charles Bartlett woodblock print, at right, of the Sikh temple at Amritsar. Recently, two more prints by the artist came our way. Both prints are dated 1916. Like the first one, these depict famous temples in India.

The 1″ wide flat frames are oiled walnut, and like the earlier frame, these have a blue painted groove echoing Bartlett’s exquisitely fine line work and gorgeous blue ink. The new frames also have special corners designed with an eye to the ornamented temple architecture depicted, but on these, that touch was accomplished with corner spandrels. It was the pattern of the arches on the little structure in this first print below that suggested the idea. The slightly different pattern for the Taj Mahal came from photos of that temple’s interior.

The architectural subject matter of the prints they house and Bartlett’s evident regard for such historic architectural sites essentially designed these frames. For frame making, the great well of tradition created by the “numberless souls” Ruskin praises is not only our vast heritage of pictorial arts but the entire world history of architectural ornament and decorative furnishings—an unfathomably deep well of help and inspiration for the frame maker and the architecture of the picture frame.

Charles W. Bartlett (1860-1940), “Udaipur,” 1916. 8 3/4″ x 11 3/4″.

Charles W. Bartlett (1860-1940), “Taj Mahal, Twilight,” 1916; 9 15/16″ x 14 1/2″

 

Close-ups of the spandrels, which I cut out with a fret saw before inlaying them into the rabbet. (See third process photo, below.)

Process—

A year ago we framed the Deb Stoner photo at right. Below are two more photos by the Portland photographer, both framed a couple of months ago.

This first one is a 14″ x 11″ sepia-toned print of bleeding hearts titled “The Liberals” (get it?). The 2″ profile in walnut stained Nut Brown is our No. 503, chosen for its undulating shape which echoes the forms of the flowers. A pale gold slip adds the finishing touch.The color photo of roses, below, is 11″ x 15″. The 2-1/2″ wide frame is No. 134—also chosen to echo the forms of the petals—in quartersawn white oak with dark Medieval Oak stain. It also has a pale gold slip.

Oak contains tannins which, when exposed to ammonia fumes, darken the wood. Enclose an oak frame in a box with dishes of ammonia and you get 400 years of aging overnight. This frame on Paul Roehl’s painting, “Spring Coast Range,” at right, is fumed. Oiled, the color is a cool brown, which as is frequently harmonizes perfectly with the painting, especially with a tonalist palette like Paul’s.

You can fume a frame in a cardboard box wrapped in a plastic bag, but it’ll start feeling makeshift after a few uses. Avi, who does our finishing, got tired of messing with that arrangement and made a simple plywood box with a clear acrylic lid. The bright red line is an old yoga mat he cut up for gasketing to seal the lid. He also sealed all the seams of the box with silicone sealant. Four draw latches secure the lid tightly. The ammonia’s three or four times stronger than your ordinary household stuff—you have to get it from an industrial chemical supplier—so, one reason you want the box well sealed is that if you get a whiff of the ammonia, it’ll knock you over. The depth of color and speed with which the wood darkens depends on the amount and strength of the ammonia, the amount of tannins in the wood, and length of exposure. The clear lid let’s you check the progress without having to open the box.

After fuming, we often just oil the wood and wax it (with solvent-free pure boiled linseed oil and linseed oil wax—from these guys or this guy), but if the color’s not quite right, the wood can still be stained—or dyed. We use water dyes rather than stains. Our dyes are very good quality and penetrate the wood well. But there’s nothing like the depth and mellow effect you get by fuming.

The frame you can see inside Avi’s fuming box is also for a Paul Roehl painting, one that we’re framing for Beloved California IX, our big annual show—opening just four weeks from today!

Autumn has its distinctive palette, and it’s no surprise to see the extraordinary colorist Tia Kratter capture it masterfully. We just framed up her “Harvest,” setting the 10″ x 13″ watercolor in a 2″ walnut slope with sight edge cushion and a copper wax slip. It’s featured in a display starting tomorrow that highlights the Gallery’s works on paper, both framed and unframed. We’ll be serving refreshments from 2 to 4 to celebrate fall. Please join us!Other Gallery artists featured include  Bill Cone, Jane Kriss,  Kim Lordier, Robin Moore, Barbara Tapp, and Erik Tiemens. We also have prints and posters by David Lance Goines and Yoshiko Yamamoto, and several antique items. In the second gallery, we have a number of framed prints and posters specially priced. View those online here.

The exhibit is up through November 2.

Wednesday’s post showed a Gustave Baumann print, “The Dooryards,” which we framed close. Here are three more woodblocks by Baumann we framed, all matted. I never get tired of serving that artist’s blithe spirit. (See other Baumann examples on the site, here, here, here, and here. One of my favorites we’ve framed, an unusual one of marigolds, is in the Portfolio, here.) Pomegranate Press has two beautiful books on Baumann, including his autobiography and Gustave Baumann: Views of Brown County. There’s also the very impressive Baumann catalogue raisonné by Gala Chamberlain of Annex Galleries, In a Modern Rendering: The Color Woodcuts of Gustave Baumann.

For myself, I won’t try use words to remark on Baumann’s work, feeling before his work a bit like the artist himself did looking out on the Grand Canyon at night: “The Canyon under a full moon,” he said, “may become a baited trap for superlatives; it is better felt than talked about.” What he had to say about his art came down to one sentence: “Draw directly on the block whatever you want, cut away whatever you don’t want and print what’s left.” In any case, the most reliable and telling expression of how we feel about any picture is the physical, architectural place we give it—the frame.

The first two frames feature shaped proud splines.

“The Swimming Pool,” below, is from the same set of a dozen prints that “The Dooryards” came from—a set Baumann called “In the Hills o’ Brown,” made in Brown County, Indiana in 1910. We framed “The Swimming Pool” in a 1″ wide flat mitered walnut frame, with outset corners and shaped proud splines. (Details at bottom of post.)

“The Swimming Pool,” 1910. Woodblock, 10-1/4″ x 13-3/4″.

In 1918, Baumann moved from Indiana to New Mexico. The two below are in the artist’s better-known style, developed after the move. For “Woodland Meadows,” below, we used a flat mitered frame and carved and softened the edges. Shaped proud splines, also carved, articulate the corners and echo a bit the shape of the trees. (Details below.)

“Woodland Meadows,” ca. 1930. Woodblock, 9-5/8″ x 11-1/4″.

“Aspen Thicket,” below, is framed in a mortise-and-tenon No. 1100 CV—1″ in quartersawn white oak (Medieval Oak stain). The sight edge chamfer is carved. (Details at bottom of post.)

“Aspen Thicket,” 1943. Woodblock, 10-7/8″ x 9-5/8″.

More Views—