Frames
For the vast majority of people the frame is seen as a necessary evil, a means to hang your piece on the wall and to provide for it a measure of protection from the outside world and possibly its immediate surroundings.
The frame is the barrier between the world you have created inside it and reality. The must react with both what’s inside it and it’s surroundings.
Some images are so powerful that they need containing in the same way that gunpowder only produces its full force when contained. Others require support, an intermediary on its journey to the eye.
There are enigmatic pictures that want no frame yet look exposed when hung without one, small pictures which disappear when the common rules of framing are applied, minimalist images that need a frame which perfectly balances the construction of the image itself in order to vanish from the consciousness.
Frames can acknowledge the period of an image without being a “period frame”. Scale and finish can evoke associations with the image that set it in context at a fraction of the price of a copy.
Chosen carefully, the frame can also provide a buffer against its background although it must be said that “Terms and Conditions apply” in this area. The recent revival of 70’s style wallpaper will defeat almost any attempt to hang pictures on it!
