Frame-making madness!

In Framing and Preparation by Zoe Nathan

(12-4-08 UPDATE: Everything is ready and at the gallery! Wahoo! We’re hanging the show with Cyndi at Artiste tomorrow. Hooray!) How amazing to discover the many road blocks to showing art! I never thought my own mind would work against me, but it has! Even my subconscious has joined the fight, railing nightmares against any ambitions I might have. But give up, I have not! The hard way to frame: By hand with a miter saw kit! After putting in an effort to make some of the more basic frames myself, I found a much smarter method: taking the task to a professional. Imagine that! Susan Granger at Solvang Graphic Arts Gallery & Frame Shop was very helpful and did a great job matting and framing my pieces. Susan runs a very professional shop, with two kinds of mat cutters running the lengths of half the walls in the back room, and a table-saw to cut custom size frames for seriously stunted artists like myself that stretch their own unconventionally sized canvases! I love the technical aspects of showing! I wanted to do a series of posts on learning to make frames, but I ended up throwing myself into the midst of the process this last week without much time to post about it. I wanted very basic frames that would make the work stand out and didn’t like the idea of hanging the canvases bare on the wall. My compromise was buying very thin strips of pine from Ace Hardware in Santa Barbara, and later, from Nielson’s Hardware in Buelton when I ran out of the first batch.