Saturday, 27 February 2021

Framed!



It has often struck me, when visiting galleries and museums, that the frames that surround masterpieces of art are often oddly out of character with the work itself. A boldly modernist painting (for example, the painting above by André Derain, photographed in the Pompidou Centre, Paris) is as often as not encased in some elaborately moulded and gilded confection, like a set of spanners in a velvet-lined jewellery box. You can only speculate that the original owner had rather less appreciation of the nature of the work they had acquired than they realised, or perhaps that the gallery has made use of whatever frames of a suitable size it already had lying around, a legacy of previous centuries. Of course, an elaborate setting can make even a set of spanners look rather special, particularly if you intend to hang them on the wall. At the other extreme, you will also see important work that has been stuck into the sort of minimal, barewood frame you might lash up to hold chicken-wire in a guinea-pig run. And, somehow, this ostentatiously careless minimalism can be more intrusive than any amount of gilded foliage.

Framing matters. It is a very instructive experience to take work to a professional picture-framer, especially if you can find one sympathetic to a broad spectrum of picture-making. There is much subtlety of judgement and empathy required to find just the right combination of moulding and mount to optimize a picture in its intended context: it's easy to forget that the fate of nearly all "works of art" offered for sale is to become just one element in some stranger's interior decoration scheme. Photographers and photography galleries tend to duck this issue by standardising on the austere narrow dark wood moulding with plain white window mount, which makes perfect sense, as photos tend to be of standard sizes, and it's a uniform approach that saves on effort and expense. For example, I was immensely grateful to let the Fotoforum gallery in Innsbruck do all the framing for my exhibition there in 2014, using their stock of standard frames. Setting aside the near impossibility of getting eighty framed A3 photos from England to Austria – I couldn't even get ten plus luggage safely in the back of the car – the expense would have been way beyond my pocket. But colour pictures, whether paintings, prints, or photographs, almost always benefit from a careful choice of moulding and mount. Done well, it should enhance the picture without drawing undue attention to itself; done with a high degree of taste and bravura, the whole thing can become an object of permanent visual delight.

I had a lot of fun preparing the ornamental versions of the photos that went into the "illuminated selection" version of my Let's Get Lost book, some of which also ended up in this year's calendar. Much as I love photography in its purest forms, there's actually something even more fulfilling about creating graphical contexts for your own work. I imagine it's like furnishing a room or choosing an ensemble of clothes, although admittedly neither of those are activities I know much about (as anyone who knows me will attest: chaos and clutter follow me everywhere, like a pair of devoted but poorly house-trained wolfhounds). So, in pursuit of more lockdown distraction, I felt inclined to go further down this pleasantly decorative road.

I quickly became interested in the idea of actually embedding a frame into the picture itself, partly as a sort of "meta" gesture, partly to entertain myself – I hold to the outmoded belief that art-making is meant to be enjoyable, and at best is simple fun – and partly to make a more attractive object out of an already (in my view, at least) outstanding photograph. So I ransacked my backfiles for photographs I had taken in the many galleries and museums I have visited in recent years that included whole frames that could be extracted, emptied, straightened up, and recycled, the more ornate or unusual the better.

When I started out, the "meta" side was uppermost in my mind. I created several pictures where the whole image contained a framed version of itself, so that it became its own context, and highlighted the selectiveness of the "framing" of photography. Um, very witty, Mike. But quite quickly my ornamental impulse overpowered this dry, po-mo approach, and started splashing the digital paint around just for fun. At which point the project took off, and I found myself knocking out several new pictures a day. The total stands at around sixty at the moment. Some of which, if I say so myself, are indeed objects of visual delight.

Inevitably, the "side by side" pictures are getting mixed up in this "framed" project, and producing some of the most interesting results. My only problem now is that I'm running out of frames, and all the galleries are shut. I'll just have to invent my own... But no problem, it's all good fun, and way better than resorting to Netflix, biscuits, or uncorking a bottle at an unseemly hour.








7 comments:

Thomas Rink said...

This brings back memories of my maternal grandfather! He had been trained as a gilder of picture frames in the early 1930s. My father inherited an oil painting in a gilded frame which my grandfather had to make for his journeyman's exam, and it's still on the wall in his living room. Well, being a trained gilder of picture frames didn't open up a lot of job opportunities in the 1930s, so my grandfather joined the Wehrmacht in order to escape unemployment. Nevertheless he always retained an interest in the Arts. When I was a boy, he used to take care of me while my mother was at work, and he often took me to the local museum after school.

Best, Thomas

PS: The picture with the chair on the beach is lovely!

Mike C. said...

Thomas,

I'm glad to have awoken such memories. There is something special about gold as a framing for almost any picture, it's hard to explain why, but it just works.

I'm very fond of the "chair" picture: it's actually the south bank of the Thames on a freezing November night, just before going in to the Royal Festival Hall to see Keith Jarrett play an amazing concert.

Mike

Kent Wiley said...

Yes, the chair by the river, and the goal net are wonderful pictures. But the frame for the track is quite the piece of work.

Interesting recollection, Thomas. The framing subject reminds me of a favorite film, which I rewatched recently for the first time in many years, Wim Wenders' "The American Friend." I think I got it this time. Gruno Ganz as a picture framer in Hamburg. As usual in a movie, not much work is done at the place of business. But the location's got a great aura.

Mike C. said...

Kent,

Thanks! As with much of my work, close scrutiny is rewarded...

I must watch "The American Friend" again myself, one of many German "new wave" films I saw back in the 1970s. It caused me to have a spate of reading Patricia Highsmith, too.

Mike

Kent Wiley said...

If you can find a copy, watch/listen to the commentary by Wim. Fabulous photography by the great Robbie Müller.

Mike C. said...

Kent,

£5.99 on [cough] Amazon... A cheap night out!

Mike

Kent Wiley said...

Effing Amazon. $1.99 in the US!