When I was going down to Leicester regularly for my photohistory course my route from the railway station to university took me past the city’s New Walk Art Gallery. Like many municipal galleries it still has the truly wonderful free entry policy. (In Hull, when I lived over that way, municipal budgets having been decimated, the City Fathers reluctantly took the decision to charge for entrance to the great Ferens Art Gallery. Then they decided to make exceptions for the young, old, unwaged, students and various other categories. In the end it turned out that the cost of administering the exemptions would be more than the income from charging for entry so they went back to free-for-everyone. Good on’em.)
If I’ve paid twenty quid or so to get into a gallery I find that a heavy feeling comes over me because I’m going to have to stay for an exhaustingly long time to justify the cost. But with free entry you can just nip in, have a quick look at one or two of your favourites and be on your way. It’s a bit like saying a quick prayer in church, if that is your bag.
So, in Leicester, if I had a few moments to spare, I would nip into the New Walk Gallery and up onto the first floor where they had a good collection of German expressionist works from the interwar years (link here). I liked many of the paintings but I was particularly struck by the mounting and framing. It was very simple and had aged beautifully. They were mostly light-to-mid shade slim wooden frames which had been stained and polished or varnished and then left to develop a lovely patina over the years. You can get an idea at about the 30 second mark in this video. It seemed to me that this worked well because the images were small and a bigger frame would have rather overwhelmed them.
Photograph of Sir Elton John by Irving Penn, part of Sir Elton John collection. Ray Tang/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.
I had long thought that the standard white mount and black frame did very little for the average photo: too stark, too unimaginative, too one-size-fits-all. It’s very common but that is probably because it is inexpensive. It is also very easy to do as I soon found out when I started my own framing. If you don’t get a perfect 45 degrees for each corner angle you use a black felt-tip pen to ink in the exposed wood in the angle and that covers up inaccuracies in your sawing.
As an alternative to the plain black frame, you can always go down the Sir Elton John route of course (right). But while that is a beautiful frame it seems to me to be rather wrestling with the very strong image of Sir Elton. In fact, I find my eye resting more on the frame than the picture.
So when I started framing again after the upheaval of a house move I still had those Expressionist works in my mind’s eye and I decided to move to bare wood frames. The first one I did was not of a photo but a print that I made at a pre-Covid Hot Bed Press which I wrote about in a post last February The frame is flat half-inch square oak. Once it was made up and ready to assemble with the mounting I gave it a light stain with antique brown wax polish and then a touch of beeswax for a slight sheen. Though I say it myself, it has come up very nicely.
Image © Mrs Barker whom you can just see in thereflection there….
The next one to get the treatment was this yoga poster which I did for my daughter out of 7/8 inch ash dome with a wax polish and beeswax again. The polish gives a beautiful grainy finish and a gorgeous deep tobacco-ish scent as well.
Finally, below left, is the René Burri photo which I wrote about in this month’s other blog post. It’s a 5/8 inch oak frame in what as known as a ‘hockey’ section – presumably because it mimicks the shape of a hockey stick. I made a mistake with the mount here as you might see. With a poster-size image such as this it would be usual to leave in the mount window either the title or the artist or both but they were squeezed in right at the bottom of this artwork. I left in the photographer’s name but it has left too big a gap under the photo itself and upset the overall balance so I will have to cut a new mount.
I don’t use plain white mounts. Horrible things. I keep a range of off-white/ivory shades and then put up the individual artwork to each one to see which suits it best. It’s very surprising how even a slight variation in mount tone can make a big difference. I also tend to use mounts with a slight waffle pattern because to my eye it sets off the grain of a photograph to good effect.
How wide the mount should be and exactly where you place the window is, quite frankly, a matter of some sorcery. There are probably rules but I’m afraid I don’t know them so I just rely on my eye to tell me what’s right.
Once you get into it, frame making is deeply contemplative. Cutting a 45 degree angle by hand, even with the help of a mitre and trimmer, is a rabbit-hole down which I can disappear for hours on end. I like to think that I enter a state of zen-like clarity but, in truth, the air can be blue. I often think I’ve nailed it but by the time I come to joining and gluing the fourth corner I realise that a true square 90 degrees has yet again eluded me and I am condemned eternally to that imperfection which is the human lot.
Domestically, at least, it is the smaller picture and frame which looks best. I’ve had several up in the house of around 40 x 50 cms in total (ie an A3 image plus mount and frame) and I am beginning to think it’s a bit too much. You might need that at an exhibition where the space is much greater but at home less seems to be more.