This Saturday I’ll be giving a presentation here at the Gallery called “Completing the Window: A Frame Maker’s Approach to Framing Landscape Paintings.” Starting with last Saturday’s post I’m posting a few examples of that approach.

This is a small undated (1920’s?) oil painting by Swedish-American painter Carl Redin (1892-1944). The 2″ wide frame is fumed quartersawn white oak, and we added a bronze slip.

Carl Redin, Cathedral Rocks, 1920’s. Oil on linen on board, 13-1/4″ x 15 5/8″.

Corner samples, No. 1.2.0 CV

The profile, No. 1.2.0 CV (corner samples are shown at right), is a new design that I came up with to express in the simplest form the powerful effect of the picture frame as a window frame. Capturing much of the effect of the early Dutch and Flemish rain sill frames, the flat face is like a window casing or trim, while the wide bevel suggests the inside planes of a window. I carved the bevel for texture and to enhance the bevel’s contrast with the face of the moulding. Those two facets of the profile’s face are proportioned 2:1.

On Redin’s “Cathedral Rocks”, the shape of the profile not only sustains and enhances the picture’s perspective but also echoes the sloping land forms depicted. The texture of the carved bevel harmonizes with the texture of the surface of the painted canvas and also evokes the coarse texture of the rocks.

Carl Redin

Carl Redin was born and raised near Stockholm. In 1913, driven by poverty, the young Swede and his family immigrated to Chicago. Joining that city’s Swedish community, he worked varnishing and restoring church paintings. A few years later Redin contracted tuberculosis and decided to catch a train for the more favorable climes of New Mexico, finding treatment in Albuquerque.

According to Wikipedia, Redin “painted during a time when New Mexico was marketing itself as an exotic getaway. His paintings adorned hotels, public buildings, and department stores.” By the ‘thirties, the artist enjoyed national recognition.

Redin would stay in the Southwest and California the rest of his life, painting and teaching, his final years spent here in the Bay Area. He passed away in Los Gatos, barely 52 years old.

More examples of this frame—

Here are two more paintings in the same frame, No. 1.2.0 CV. Both hang in the Gallery. The first is by Davis Perkins, the second by Paul Kratter.

Again, I’ll present “Completing the Window: A Frame Maker’s Approach to Framing Landscape Paintings” this Saturday, August 22, at 2:00 in the afternoon. It’ll be followed by a tour of the shop. I hope you’ll come. It’s free, but space is limited, so please email us (info@holtonframes.com) to let us know if we can save you a place.

—Tim Holton

Next Saturday, August 22, at 2:00 I’ll be giving a presentation here at the Gallery called “Completing the Window: A Frame Maker’s Approach to Framing Landscape Paintings.” This coming week I’ll post a few examples of that approach.

The Harry Adamson painting before re-framing

This 28″ x 48″ oil painting,”Evening Majesty—Canada Geese in Migration” is a great example of the work of Harry Curieux Adamson (1916-2012). The painting came in a factory-made black and metal leaf frame. In terms of proportion and visual elements, that setting could’ve been worse, but the quality of the painting deserved better craftsmanship on the part of a framer. So I replaced it, making this 4″ wide carved compound mitered frame in quarter sawn white oak with Dark Medieval Oak stain, and a pale gold liner. My customer had admired this framing of ours for a Thomas Hill painting and wanted something similar for the Adamson. For the corner carving on the frame for the Hill, I’d taken my cue from the shrubs in the foreground, which looked to me like wintering berries of some sort. But given the pines in this painting, we thought pine branches would be more suitable.

“Evening Majesty—Canada Geese in Migration,” N.D. Oil on canvas, 28″ x 48″

Harry Curieux Adamson, 1916-2012

This painting captures a scene in Canada, but Adamson spent most of his life here in the Bay Area. (He was born in Seattle.) Early in his career he worked as an illustrator at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley, and was a founding member of the Mt. Diablo Audubon Society. In keeping with landscape painting’s tradition of placing attention on the cause of preserving wilderness, Adamson donated many of his paintings to conservation efforts. The catalog for the Oakland Museum’s 2002 exhibition of Adamson’s paintings noted that the 86 year old painter “is perhaps the oldest living wildlife artist today.” The artist lived for another decade. It was a long and prolific life devoted to the beauty of the land and its creatures, and to the art of landscape and wildlife painting. Adamson’s works deserve frames worthy of that devotion and its achievements.

We framed another Adamson a few years ago, this one below. It’s 18″ x 22″ in a 3-1/2″ compound frame in walnut with a copper-bronze slip.

Again, my presentation “Completing the Window: A Frame Maker’s Approach to Framing Landscape Paintings” will take place next Saturday, August 22, at 2:00, and will be followed by a tour of the shop. I hope you’ll come. The event is free, but space is limited, so please contact us at info@holtonframes.com to reserve your place.

—Tim Holton

On Saturday afternoon, August 22, I’ll be giving a talk titled “Completing the Window: A Frame Maker’s Approach to Framing Landscape Paintings.”

Paul Kratter, “Valley Ranch Near Half Moon Bay”

It’s a truism that a frame should complement the picture that’s in it. But what does that mean? How should we think about the frame, and how can we design frames to successfully complement pictures?

As a culture, we seem to have lost our understanding of the relationship between frames and pictures. My fifty years of framing have taught me many lessons regarding that relationship. Especially fascinating has been the more than two decades of running a gallery of landscape paintings, framing every piece that’s displayed, and witnessing again and again the transformative effect of a truly complementary frame.

That experience has also given me a unique perspective on the fate of frames over the past few centuries. For deep cultural reasons reflecting our relationships to pictures, the art of the picture frame has become debased and degraded, with the inevitable consequence that it has frequently failed pictures, thus compelling many artists, galleries, collectors and even museums to ignore and abandon the frame. While frames have, in the words of frame historian Lynn Roberts “suffered exile and destruction,” I’ve witnessed again and again how frames not only enhance landscape paintings but complete them as windows in our homes, windows on the land.

 The talk will be here at the Gallery at 2:00, with questions afterward and a tour of the shop thrown in.

The event is free, but space is limited, so please email us to reserve your seat.

—Tim Holton

Arthur Frank Mathews (1860-1945) was California’s premiere muralist and a leading teacher in the state. He was also a great advocate for Arts and Crafts ideals—which led him directly to an appreciation for the significance of the architecture of the frame and its worthiness as an artform. We’ve enjoyed the privilege of framing several works by Mathews and his wife, Lucia Kleinhans Mathews (1870-1955). These jobs have been a wonderful opportunity to draw on the decorative vocabulary the couple are known for. This 18-1/4″ x 14-1/4″ pastel of a girl picking flowers on a poppy-covered hillside was a chance to employ the iconic carved, low relief, polychromed poppy patterns the Mathewses developed—a pure expression of their love for California.

The frame is a compound mitered frame in fumed and oiled quartersawn white oak with a gilt slip. Given the gentle rounded form of the hillside and the oak trees, I chose the cushion form for the overall profile, adding a complementary form, a cove, to the sight edge. The cap is a low cushion as well, and I carved outlines of poppies at the corners and painted them.

This piece was framed for California Historical Design, and is available from them. View it here.

Another Arthur Mathews I framed can be seen here. A lovely framed watercolor by Lucia Mathews is here.

Depictions of architecture, cabinetry, furniture and other things made of wood are always possible cues for the wooden structure that is a frame. Such constructions are themselves, after all, essentially frames of one kind or another. A wooden ladder is another kind of frame. So when we received this very sweet little (just 13-1/4″ x 3″) woodblock print, titled “Hen and Rooster” (1915), by the wonderful shin hanga master Gesso Yoshimoto (1881-1936), the idea came to me for a frame design that would play off the ladder. The construction of the ladder is identical to a mortise and tenon frame, and in this case, the tall, narrow proportions of the print lent themselves to the treatment as well.

The frame is walnut finished with black-tinted beeswax, the wood and finish harmonizing perfectly with the tones in Yoshimoto’s print. Trevor made the frame with flush through tenons visible on the sides for a subtle, pleasing detail. The ends of the stiles and the tops and bottoms of the rails (the rungs of the ladder) are cut at angles to echo the chickens’ ladder.

One thing that makes this print so charming is how it elevates a scene we too often ignore or dismiss as mundane. The old pejorative was “worldly.” Here, the worldly and ordinary are recognized for their significance and beauty.

This is the essential power of the frame, as a threshold that connects two realms, demonstrating the efficacy, in tangible, present reality, of the imaginary, the illusory, the remembered image. The real presence of the frame completes the picture’s mission to re-present—that is, make present again—what is not, or is no longer, present.

As proof and testimony to a picture’s efficacy in its present setting, the frame honors and elevates the picture. And for elevating things, whether a rooster or a work of art, a ladder can come in handy!

By the way, this print came from our friends at the superb Ronin Gallery in New York City.

Part IV of my six-part series “A Joiner’s Art: Frame Making as Woodworking” for Picture Framing Magazine has come out. The first installment, published last May, introduced the topic with some history and an overview (read Part I, probably the most interesting one for the general reader, here), then Part II (here) got into the craft starting with a discussion of wood and the workshop. Part III, here, in the December 2025 issue, explored selecting and milling wood, and cutting moulding profiles. Part IV is on joinery (the subhead is misleading; the editors accidentally forgot to update it from the previous installment). Here’s a taste of it:

A picture can only be well-framed if it’s in a well-made frame. The traditional woodworkers who were the first frame makers regarded joinery as the essence of their trade—which is why they were called joiners. So it is also the essence of the art of the frame when frame making is restored to its roots and treated as a joiner’s art.

You can read the whole installment online here.

Picture Framing Magazine has just published Part III of what will be a six-part series I’m writing for them called “A Joiner’s Art: Frame Making as Woodworking.” The first installment, which came out in May, introduced the topic with some history and an overview (read Part I here), while Part II (here) delved into the craft beginning with a discussion of wood and the workshop. Part III, in the December 2025 issue, explores selecting and milling wood, and cutting moulding profiles. You can read it here.

—Tim Holton

After a long stretch of dry weather here in the Bay Area, we’re expecting several days of rain over Christmas. There is, in other words, a change in the air—which happens to be the title of this Terry Miura painting. Right now, “Change in the Air” hangs in the showroom by the entrance to the gallery, greeting visitors to our big annual all-gallery show, Beloved California X.

Terry Miura
“Change in the Air”
Oil on panel, 12″ x 16″. $2,900 framed.
BUY

We set the 12″ x 16″ oil in a 2-1/2″ wide carved and stained quarter sawn white oak frame with a 1/8″ pale gold slip. I like how the carved texture emphasizes Terry’s brushwork, while the flat profile echoes the flat horizon.I also love a second painting of Terry’s included in the show: “El Dorado Homestead, No. 2” .

Terry Miura
“El Dorado Homestead No. 2”
Oil on panel, 8″ x 16″. $2,000 framed.
BUY

On December 30, the last day of the exhibit, we’ll host an open house from 11:00 to 2:00. (Though we’re normally closed on Tuesdays, we’ll be open on the 30th.) Hope you’ll find a chance to come by during these final days of 2025 (change is indeed in the air!) and Beloved California X.

—Tim Holton

We’ve just finished hanging Beloved California X. One of the painters featured is James McGrew. I especially love his 11″ x 14″ painting of this beautiful bit of shoreline at Lake Tahoe. James painted it last summer when teaching at the Plein Air Convention at Reno/Lake Tahoe.

James McGrew, “Sand Harbor,” 2025. Oil on birch panel, 11″ x 14″. $2,500 framed.

This work exemplifies the subtitle of our show, “Twenty-One Painters With a Passion for Place.” James describes his strong personal connection to this sandy cove where he spent many happy days as a kid, and then as a dad swimming in the chilly, clear mountain water with his two daughters.

The frame, in beautifully figured stained quarter sawn white oak, is a 2-1/4″ wide plain slope with a sight edge chamfer leafed with white gold.

“Upper Yosemite Fall,” 8″ x 6″. $1,000 framed.

James McGrew, who’s established himself as one of the premiere painters of our national parks, will be in the Bay Area this weekend. At 2 pm this afternoon, just over the hill in Moraga, he’ll be giving a lecture at St Mary’s College Museum of Art in conjunction with their current exhibit, “Echoes of Yosemite.” Titled “Influential Brushwork: Establishment and Preservation of Yosemite National Park Through Art,” the presentation “will cover the close relationship of art with the public awareness, preservation and management of Yosemite,” and how James carries on that legacy through his own work. At right is one of James’s terrific Yosemite paintings, also featured in our show.

“Beloved California X: Twenty-One Painters With a Passion for Place” opens Saturday—tomorrow! I hope you’ll come to our reception from 2 to 4 in the afternoon and meet many of the artists, including James McGrew.

—Tim Holton