Perfect Complements: Two New Paintings from Kim Lordier

Kim Lordier is one pictorial artist who fully appreciates the reciprocal and complementary relationship between a painting and its frame. A few months ago, the artist took home a couple of frames of ours, and then last week brought them back with a pair of her beautiful pastels installed.

This first one is “Twilight Song in Amber,” 14 1/8″ x 19 1/2″. The frame is a No. 230—2 1/4″ in fumed quartersawn white oak with clear linseed oil finish, and an 18 kt gilt slip. One of the main ways a slope profile like this serves a picture is by enhancing perspective. With a view looking down a road or path or stream, a slope frame sustains the picture’s sense of depth and distance, helping it draw us in. And that’s precisely what Kim took advantage of here. She also enjoyed repeating and harmonizing the ochre-brown color—or dark amber referred to by her title?—of the fumed and oiled oak frame with the trees and shrubs in the shaded landscape. The muted, neutral tones of the frame enhance and intensify the rich colors in the picture. Also notice how she used the ray flake pattern in the wood of the frame to echo elements of the picture.

Kim Lordier‘s “Twilight Song in Amber” is available here.

The second pastel, shown below, Kim titled “Among the Listening Trees” (14 3/4″ x 10 3/4″). The frame is a No. 17.15 H CV—2 1/2″ with hand carved cable pattern, in walnut with clear linseed oil finish. It has a bronze waxed slip. Compared to the first painting, this image of a barn against a relatively flat backdrop of eucalyptus trees has less perspectival depth, making it more suited to a flat frame. The carved patterns at the frame’s corners suggest a rope—which you’re sure to find hanging right there in the horses’ red tack house.

“Among the Listening Trees” is available here.

Both paintings exemplify Kim Lordier’s mastery of complements—elements that in juxtaposition and contrast complete and perfect each other. (“Perfect” is another word that means finished or completed, “so as to leave nothing wanting.”) This is most obvious in her use of complementary colors and values, light and shadow. But also, perspective is a matter of the complementary relationship between near and far—the road at our feet in the foreground contrasted with the distant hill with its beckoning sun. Then there’s the way the verticality of her stately eucalyptus trees reaching high complement the horizontal ground and earthbound life they preside over.

Even Kim’s titles refer to complements: the blue of twilight encroaches on the amber tones of the day’s last sunlight on the hill; as the green of the eucalypti complements the red barn, the trees also listen—an act that is the natural complement to two horses (of course there are two, so they can complement each other) who surely have things to converse about.

And Kim’s mastery of complements extends to the reciprocal relationship between picture and frame—two arts attending to two realms that are only fully alive in their interdependent relationship to each other. The picture’s realm of memory or imagination awaits a place in present, tangible reality. As Van Gogh said, “A picture without a frame is like a soul without a body.” What Kim understands is that it is no compromise or liability to have her work be affected by its architectural surroundings—to enhance the picture just as the picture enhances its setting. The frame is not a constraint but an opportunity—a chance for the vision the artist has created to join the real world of its architectural setting. The re-presentational picture when it leaves the easel yearns for its mission to be fulfilled and completed by a frame that will present it. Meanwhile, the empty frame hung on the wall is like window trim without the window—the vista, the prospect, the revelation—to transform the picture frame into a window frame and fulfill its own role. As natural complements, picture and frame together complete the window, and each other. The picture is perfect.

This is one of the great lessons fifty years of framing, and working with extraordinary painters like Kim Lordier, has taught me.

Again, Kim Lordier‘s “Twilight Song in Amber” is available here, and her “Among the Listening Trees” is available here.

—Tim Holton

« Back to Blog