Hidden Treasures

In every community there lurks a hidden treasure and we in the South Coast artist’s enclave have one in the Easy Lane Frame and Select Gallery.

We all, or at least most of us, know Ken and Jane Snoddy are tireless supporters of the arts. Their gallery hosts many shows each year, they provide custom framing at reasonable prices and they have a multitude of gift ideas from original art to note card reproductions. (Just because the South Coast doesn’t get much snow who says New England has a monopoly on the greeting card business.) And if this wasn’t enough, Ken can also handle your fine art printing needs.

When a photographer creates an image they have worked for hours, sometimes months to find the right combination of elements. Painters have a much easier time of it, they can take elements collected in their memories, from many locations in all sorts of weather and combine them in a single painting, but a photographer has to actually track down the right location, wait in the freezing cold for just the right light to create that breathless picture. Photographers do this for every picture they create and then they run off to the Walmart and send their film or file off to some high school part-timer to run through a machine and squeeze out a muddy print. No, you say, not me, I have my prints done on archival paper at a professional print maker’s press where they take the time and energy to get it just right.

Either way you are still trusting your precious work to a stranger, who may or may not have any idea of what you had to do to get it in the first place. Why not trust it to someone who is a photographer? Ken Snoody is a professional photographer who creates fine art prints from his own work, who better to turn your raw material into a print for presentation to a jury? And he has all the tools to do what the big labs do and he’s in the neighborhood.

Did you ever take a picture on a rainy day, (Oregon dummy), and when it comes out of the camera it’s all soft and squidgy and pastelly? Sounds like a perfect candidate for printing on canvas. But that’s cheating making a photograph look like a painting. Yeah right, and photo-realist painters have been making paintings look like photographs long before Daguerre figured out how to capture an image on a plate. Its your work, putting it on canvas or silk or handmade paper are just some of the tricks of the trade, claiming it’s a painting when you print on canvas is a fraud, remember you’re an artist not a smiling conman on a cable network television show.

So when that one special picture comes along or a show which needs new and never shown prints remember Easy Lane Frames and Select Gallery and let a man who knows what you have done to get that shot keep his hands on the controls. You’ll feel better about it and the results will justify your feelings