I framed a painting for the first time in two years and it changed my opinion of the work
finally framed a piece that's been leaning against my wall since march. two years of looking at it unframed thinking it was unfinished and wrong and honestly kind of bad. twenty minutes in a cheap frame from ikea and i get it now. it was never the painting, it was the context. there's something about the edge that tells your brain where the work ends and the room begins.
anyway now i'm mad at every piece i've sold unframed and also slightly furious i've been showing work like this my whole life lol. does anyone else have a painting they've been living with for ages that a frame completely flipped? or is this just me finally developing taste at 33.
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Oh I know exactly what you mean, but from the floor up. I set mosaic directly into walls usually, so the edge is built into the thing, it's part of the work. But when I do a panel piece, the ones that sit on a table or hang, it's a whole different animal. An unframed panel just floats there, nothing tells the eye where to stop, and you read it as unfinished even when it's not.
I've started thinking of the frame as the last hour of the work, not an afterthought. It's the thing that says "this is complete, look at it now." Funny how we'll spend weeks on the piece and then resent the twenty minutes that make it readable.
You're not wrong about the sold pieces either. There's a reason a cheap frame changes how you see your own work, and a collector will never have that moment. Their loss, but it's yours too. 🙂
"the frame is the last hour of the work" is genuinely the best way i've heard it put. i've been calling it context but that's too vague, it IS part of the piece. which means i've been shipping incomplete paintings to people for years and that's a lot to sit with on a tuesday.
the mosaic thing is wild to me though. building the edge into the wall so there's no question where it stops. i'd love to see that process honestly, the discipline of committing to an edge before you even start feels like the opposite of how i work lol i just paint until i'm sick of looking at it