frames
Farmerman, I hear you. Business and friendship rarely mix well. Thanks!!!
AND, most of my acrylics are of the oil-type in style, but I have been a few experiments with fluid acrylics of heave paper. The latter will have to be approached as if they were watercolors. Good reminder.
forgot to mention - I don't know what other's opinion is - but I think that coloured mounts rarely work. On the less is more theme I nearly always use antique white - white is too stark and this is a soft neutral cream. It means that paintings work together when hung in a show and is gives a good neutral setting to show them off and works well with the limed ash I have for framing.
Coloured mounts can look tacky and amateur except in rare circumstances.
I agree about colored mats. And sometimes even cream is too stark, bringing us back to GW's comment that the old masters' paintings are often framed sans linen, etc.
The two paintings of mine that I mentioned having washed silk on a coved frame, which I guess GW calls a well, did work for me...the pale silk wasn't white or cream, but grey blue and gray green; it didn't become part of the paintings, nor did it contrast as much as white or cream would...it simply read away - those framings, by a very good framer, did work, with those particular paintings. But these two are exceptions to me. Usually I subscribe to the less is more point of view too.
The main problem with linen shades is that some of them can look pallid or even dirty because of some color mismatching to the image. I'm rather of a framing minamalist and often will frame something with a simple fillet in a deep well linen mat with a simple outside moulding. Overframing is rampant in this business, purely to try and make some lowly print look like some kind of masterpiece. It's customer perception that is catered (or pandered, whichever way one wants to look at it) to.
GW, we all don't always deal with prints.
talking of prints - artists prints like etchings and drypoint - do you do any? if you do, do you frame so that the plate mark shows or frame tightly as with a watercolour?
I vary it depending on the image but wonder how other people frame?
Berenice Abbott used to practice the rule of 2 sides even the top and bottom less and more. I wish I had the money to afford good framers. I have come to realize good framers are worth their weight in gold. Occasionally I had clients where the frame was no expence. The framing jobs went far beyond my conservative choice and made the images look very valuable. As far as a cheap way of framing things,I have solved that problem. I become a sculpture of nature, one of my first loves. The framing is done by nature. When I was 10 I used to pile all the hay bales on the slope of the hill as a field of geometric haynails as my work of art.I would wait aside the road to see how heads turned or fingers pointing were a big thing.
if you sculpt in nature Framing is never a problem.
Christmas Tree Cemetery
http://community.webshots.com/photo/51782801/52975575chpVDk
Watercolors, pastels, drawings, etc. can be looked upon with the same framing motif as prints. Original acrylics and oils don't always need liners but if one is going to use linen, I'd make sure the shade of the linen coordinates well with the image and I'd usually recommend a fillet inside the linen so that it isn't the edge of the image. When talking colored liners, I don't see a problem with a mat fillet being a color picked up from the image but that's personal tase. A colored main mat has to refer to a color in the image and it will nearly always become part of the image which is not ideal. I'm also in favor of the wider matting, especially on small drawings that museums normallyn use. A five to eight inch mat is a good choice on a small drawing say about 6" x 8" so that it "floats" on the wall. I always use a 5" matt on large watercolors, prints, etc. The practice of adding an inch to the bottom is still a good idea for balance but it isn't normally done on commercial prints.
