The devil is in the details.

Oh brother is that the truth. Being an artist is like disarming a bomb in the dark, you know what you want the work to be, you have the skills to make it, you are willing to take all the time necessary, but in the end someone else will decide if it has value. Boom! That’s the double-secret catch to working in the arts, some one else has the final answer,

So what? Give up the paints, toss out the easel, sell the kiln and take up yoga? No of course not, you go back into the studio and work some more. Meanwhile that perfect piece lives in the closet waiting for the right time to make its move.

When you don’t sell your work or it doesn’t get juried into the show you labored so hard to get into, the why of it all can be overwhelming. What went wrong?

Maybe nothing. Yes, that’s right, maybe nothing. Maybe the right judge, the right buyer, the right reviewer, the right director, the right moment in history was busy somewhere else and you lost while some other artist had the day of his life.

But maybe the piece was stalled by the details. The piece of work had all of the love and skill and time you could wring from the stone of your life and then in a flash, pressed by time, you snatched an empty frame out of the closet and sent it off to school.

You did what? You snatched a frame out of the closet and sent that perfect work off to win or die with a frame you snatched out of some closet? Please, you are an artist; you exercise great care in everything that you do. Then why do so many works wind up in galleries handicapped by frames a junkie wouldn’t steal?

Yes, the frame is part of your work and if you don’t believe it go to Pictureframes.com.

http://www.pictureframes.com/scripts/WebObjects/PictureFrames.woa/wa/Home

Or American Frame

http://www.americanframe.com/

And use their nifty little pre-viewer to see what your work will look like in a variety of frames.

And yes, the painters do have an advantage here; they can do gallery wrap paintings and never have to sweat the right frame. Of course they don’t, they go out and pick frames every bit as badly as any other group of artists.

And why do they do that? Because they spend all of their time on making art. The frame becomes just something to use as an anchor point of the hanging wires.

What’s wrong with just any old frame? I mean if it fits…
The wrong frame can bury your carefully created work. There’s mismatched density. The work is heavy, palette knife or impasto and the frame is thin metal, or even worse the frame is heavy, gold baroque. What if the work is something delicate and fine like a pen and ink or gouache and it is stuck with a frame with enough gold leaf to cover the Arc of the Covenant... The work is small and hidden inside a frame which could easily contain Dumbo and all of his elephant family or the work is busy with lots of detail and the frame is so complex and heavily carved with leaves and vines that the visual become nothing, but mud from ten feet away.

Take a close look at works hanging in the major museums, especially their private, museum owned works; they have small mono-color frames with a wide white mat. (Okay, you can have a black mat, but no earth tones, double mats or wild pastels, please.) Why do museum curators favor such bland frames?

Because they want the work to be the focus of the exhibit!

A good frame draws the eye in and begs the viewer to examine the work inside. “Look at me” it whispers while giving a come hither glance at the stunned public.

Creativity has its place in the work which you do, but in the frame you select for your piece, less is more. Be a good little artist and let your work do all the talking.