Framing Gustave Baumann Prints

Over the years we’ve had the pleasure to frame quite a few prints by master American printmaker Gustave Baumann (1881-1971). Here are three just finished:

Gustave Baumann, “Early Spring, Brown County”
Gustave Baumann, “Rio Pecos”
Gustave Baumann, “Coast Range”

The frames are stained walnut compounds.

The flats are thin to act more as mats, although they’re on top of the glass, and cover the wide margins of the prints. The profiles are wide (4-1/2″ + 3/16″ gilt slips) but simple using 1/8″ radius coves to create a simple rhythm of lines. Here’s a corner detail:

The customer was very kind to let me use this image below of his hallway where he displays earlier Baumanns we’ve framed for him.

(Ted Ellison photo)

More Baumanns we’ve framed can be found in the “Prints and Works on Paper” section of the Portfolio.

Framing James Cosgrove

A customer recently brought in this little (5-3/4″ x 8″) oil on board by Glasgow painter James Cosgrove(b. 1939). The stained walnut frame was designed entirely to the painting, with a carved cushion rim around a flat with fine carved flutes. I’m very pleased with the harmony of line and form, as well as color—a rare occasion when black works best with a painting.

Framing Contemporary Photographs–Geoffrey Agrons, 2

A couple of years ago I posted an entry about framing Geoffrey Agrons’s wonderful photographs. Here are a couple more we just did.

This first one, “Big, Big Love” is in an exhibit opening this month at the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO. It’s framed in a No. 123.8 Century Series flat, 3″ wide, in stained walnut.

The second example, a still life, is framed in our most basic mortise-and-tenon frame, the Aurora, with a liner that’s an ogee with a bead at the sight edge. The outer frame is a nod to the art of the cabinetmaker, while the refined liner picks up the forms and fine lines of the photo.

See more of Geoffrey’s work on his site, here.

For more on framing photographs close, i.e., without a visible mat, read my article “Close Framed Photographs,” for Picture Framing Magazine.

Framing Ed Bearden—and Playing with Chamfers

I really enjoy chamfering and playing with chamfers as a design element.

Here’s an acrylic on paper, recently framed, by mid-century Texan Edward Carpenter Bearden (1919-1980). We had fun coming up with this adaptation of our Aurora frame with flat mortise-and-tenon corners. We often use it with a chamfer all around the sight edge. In this case we played off the mountain peaks in the picture by adding the sets of points near the corners. On the same theme, Trevor shaped the corner plugs with a peak rather than our usual pillow form.

The frame profile is 1-1/2″ wide, and the wood is black walnut greyed down with a black wash.

Might have framed this piece close, but the customer preferred to mat it, in part to scale up a fairly small painting (about 11″ x 17″) to make it a stronger element on the wall—a perfectly good reason. The grey mat avoids the separating effect of white matting.

Another entry on chamfering is here.

Recent Bill Cone work, and framing

Bill Cone recently brought in these two beautiful pastels for The Summer Show.

“Gateway Morning,” pastel on paper. 8″ x 8″.
“Wildflowers,” pastel on paper. 9″ x 12″.  

We’ve also just completed framing a few of Bill’s works for a customer. Here they are:

All are profiles that are simple but designed to suit Bill’s direct and no nonsense views of the natural landscape. They’re done in carved walnut, muted with a light stain, which is just right with the artist’s palette and texture.

Bill’s blog is always fascinating. Top notch!

Framing Kevin Courter’s “Cradled Moon”

Enjoyed framing this 12″ x 14″ oil for Kevin Courter, now at New Masters Gallery in Carmel. Chose walnut for its color (used a light stain to get the harmony just right) and because it’s good for carving. Chose a flat profile, since it’s a flat composition, but at the sight edge it’s got a very subtle convex, or ovolo, form echoing the form of the treetops cradling the moon. The frame similarly cradles the painting. The carved pattern takes its cue from the crescent moon and the branches. The narrow slip with lemon gold leaf matches the moon.

Framing Photographs—I: Contemporary Landscapes by Geoffrey Agrons

Geoffrey Agrons is a good customer and a superb photographer. We just framed this set of his photos printed on handmade Japanese paper, and they present a good opportunity to demonstrate two important lessons of framing design: framing contemporary photographs close, and individualized frame design. Geoffrey sent seven photos, most of which are of the Cape May area during last winter’s huge snow storm. (The large one here is of a woods in Ireland.)

For a slide show, with larger images, click here.

We decided to frame them all in walnut, a wood we frequently choose for photographs, first, because of the suitably native cool color—we used a black wash to better match the sepia ink color on most of them—and second, because of its tight grain and smooth texture, which is consistent with the smooth surface of photographs.

For the first image, above, I chose a slope for the overall profile since it was appropriate to the deep perspective as well as the slope of the ground and the angles formed by the roots. A cove terminating at the top with a fine bead made an ideal form to suit the trees and roots half-embedded in the earth.

What fascinated me in this image was the staccato rhythm of the line of fencing in contrasting with the soft forms of snow. So that’s what I echoed in the frame, using fine 1/6″ “quirks,” or steps, and a soft cove at the sight edge. Here’s a detail of the frame profile.

A flat profile was chosen for this picture because of the flat horizon. It’s true that there is a deep perspective in this image, but the horizontal quality seems to be stronger. (If more of the stream could be seen meandering away toward the horizon, that might have swayed me to go with a slope.) A fine line, its 1/8″ width in proportion to the sharp lines in the photos, was raised near the sight edge, and a gentle ovolo (convex form) at the sight edge to echo the banks of the stream and the snow.

This frame is a similar flat profile with a raised line, but with a cove at the sight edge. I love the way the grain of the walnut echoes the clouds.

This frame is a good example of the importance of line proportion because it’s essentially a frame that’s been an old standby for us, the Eastwood—a flat profile with a narrow step at the sight edge and a broader step at the back edge. But the line proportions formed by these steps had to be just right for this picture, since it’s so simple, and those line proportions that have become standard for the Eastwood were too wide for this image, so we adapted them to suit this specific photo.

For this color photo, a slope was chosen to echo the angle of the snow. I used a carved panel just outside the sight edge to echo the sense of coarse texture.

Finally, for this extremely subtle image I used a profile with a suitably very subtle curve down at the sight edge. The frame’s basically flat, but coves up toward the back edge with a quirk and a bead at the back edge, providing definition while also echoing the cylindrical form of the posts.

For more on framing photographs close, i.e., without a visible mat, read my article “Close Framed Photographs,” for Picture Framing Magazine.

Geoffrey will be showing these pieces and more this September at he New Jersey Audubon Nature Center in Goshen, NJ.

Again, click here to view these in a slide show (with larger views).

Framing Paintings—I: Kevin Courter’s “Colusa Sunset”

“All true art is praise,” as John Ruskin said, getting right at the heart of picture-making (and blowing the top off a lot of pretentious blather about art, too). Last fall Kevin Courter brought in this work of praise, a 16″ x 20″ oil on linen, less than 2 weeks before our show, “A Heaven in the Eye” was to open. It’s a stunner, as you can see, and to a frame-maker an inspiration. My enthusiasm and the extra focus imposed by the deadline spurred me to produce one of my favorite recent pieces.

Kevin says this is near Gray Lodge Wildlife Area off I-5 in Colusa County — a place I haven’t been to but which a number of customers praised to the skies (how else to say it?) for the astonishingly huge flocks of geese and rare species to be seen there. It’s a place where you can feel as though bird life is as strong as ever; as if life everlasting still means something (as it surely does, after all); as if we can still witness nature’s eternal beauty (which we can). It’s some place to praise.

Most of the framing we do is more restrained, simple, frank. But one thing a frame legitimately does is sustain and amplify the praise the picture has started, and this praise can be as lavish as you like, so long as the frame remains subordinate to the picture and obeys the first law of the universe: the law of help. Or, to borrow William Morris’s words, “all this is not luxury, if it be done for beauty’s sake, and not for show.”

There’s a very important distinction between this use of decorative treatment to enhance a painting and the illegitimate praise the frame has frequently been enlisted to lavish on, not the subject of the picture but the picture itself—the picture as trophy, as symbol of status and wealth. In this role the frame is often oddly blind to the character of the picture. Is a slick gold frame ever well-suited to a painting of a cow or a weather-beaten barn—or a muddy river bank? That’s the frame as unflattering flatterer and sycophant, not as friendly home or accompanist.

The frame’s praise of nature begins with suitable materials, and this was a beautiful piece of American Black walnut, with rich native color (a little stain was used to get the color harmony just right) and a bit of interest in the grain but still even and workable for carving. I chose walnut for the cool brown native color and the tight grain which is better for detailed carving. Also, our most frequently used wood, quartersawn oak, has strong figure that can compete with this more refined kind of carving.

It’s hard to take frame designs to this level on smaller or more impressionistic or on tonally subdued paintings. But a work as strong as this one leaves room for the frame-maker to be more free. This piece was large enough, had enough tonal power, and was simply so reverential in spirit that it called for a more elaborate frame. It is also detailed and highly rendered enough to suggest more detail in the frame.

The key to having a frame be more elaborate without upstaging the painting is the harmony of the elements (line, form, material, color, texture) and economy in their use: every element and detail should have a reason for being—should be justified by the painting, and echo an element or detail in the painting. In other words, key to keeping the frame subordinate to the painting is having nothing in the frame that isn’t a complement to, or echo of, something in picture. In this case, the primary form in the painting is the cloud. This frame’s response to that form is obvious (the carved bead with rounded stops at the corners, the scallop stops on the flat). The amount and strength of line in the frame must be economical as well—constrained by what suits the painting. I had fun picking up the fine grasses in the foreground with fine carved lines at the frame’s sight edge.

I don’t expect to ever make another frame exactly like this, because there’ll never be another painting exactly like this. That’s one of the tests of a truly living art form: it’s alive to the other arts—and to the world—-in specific ways. But it’s not hard to do. It just requires taking the time to truly see and appreciate the adjacent arts. And it demands that we work with both freedom and humility in our service to the other arts.

It helps, too, to have inspiration, which in this case was provided by Kevin Courter and the landscape of Colusa County, California.

Carved Walnut

Of all the woods we use, we tend to emphasize quartersawn white oak. But walnut has always been a big favorite too, especially for carving. In preparing for the Paul Kratter show in June, the painting we decided to use for the publicity suggested walnut. Here’s a corner detail of the frame, which is a compound design, meaning it’s composed of more than one molding. This one has a cap molding as well as a liner. The liner has pale gold leaf laid directly on the walnut so the grain comes through.

The color of walnut harmonizes well with many pieces because it’s rich without being too intense. We typically stain it – this one has a light stain – to mute it even further.

We use walnut frequently for drawing frames (i.e., narrow profiles), but it’s often great on paintings and other items.