I’ve been wanting to post about this job we framed many months ago. Finally pulling it out of the archives I remembered the enigmatic image as well as its intriguing title: “Humanization.” But I’d forgotten who the artist was. Looking it up today, his identity gave this picture’s title a whole new meaning: “Humanization” stands in opposition to the dehumanization that is war—what the artist, Aleksei Bordusov (a.k.a. Aec Interesni Kaski) is presumably witnessing right now in his city of Kyev, Ukraine.

The picture portrays humanization as not only evolutionary. For this muralist with a degree in architecture, humanization evidently has much to do with the art of building and the many arts it shelters. Such making, after all, makes us human—humanizes us. Conversely, acts of war and destruction are our unmaking, our dehumanization.

But the picture is nonetheless as enigmatic as a dream—and perhaps that’s the nature of our imperfect and elusive understanding of our own humanity.

The architecture of the frame is drawn from the architecture depicted in the 26″ x 36″ print.  Playing off the vaulted ceiling that frames the fantastic scene, we created a 2″ wide Honduran mahogany cove frame with a chamfered and parcel gilt sight edge. I made a steel punch in the shape of the gilded stars on the ceiling and used it to decorate the mahogany. We finished the wood with clear oil followed by a dark wax to accentuate the punched stars.

Aleksei Bordusov and St George

After earning a degree in architecture, Aleksei Bordusov’s artistic career began in earnest in the early ’90’s when, according to his website, “he started painting on the streets of Kyev as part of a graffiti crew.” He eventually became a muralist and now has murals all over the world (including several in the US).

At right is one in Kyev. It’s called “St George.” John Ruskin, in founding his utopian project, the Guild of St George, identified the dragon St George is traditionally shown slaying as “the Lord of Decomposition”—the antithesis of the human creative spirit that joins the world. Note that in Bordusov’s version of the story, the dragon is a pair of land-grabbing hands. A webpage by a Kyev tour guide surveying the city’s murals notes that the artist has explained that “the warrior symbolizes Ukrainian people, and the serpent—all the sorrows and obstacles which the country stands opposite.”

One wonders, what will be the fate of this mural? We may hope that, even if Putin’s forces destroy it, the massive, architectural place and presence it has enjoyed has earned the image a permanence in the minds of many Ukrainians—an image of the human spirit conquering the dehumanizing, destructive beast.

But it is the lives and well-being of Mr. Bordusov and the Ukrainian people that we are most concerned for. May the war be brief, few lives lost, and the elusive dream of humanization somehow triumph.

James Rieser at Rieser Fine Art in Carmel recently asked us to frame this beautiful landscape painting by contemporary Oregon artist Thomas Jefferson Kitts. “Tranquility” (2021, oil on canvas, 36″ x 48″) is available from Jim’s gallery. (View online, here.)

The old wooden structure (the remnant of a bridge?) in the picture’s foreground pushed us toward a plain mortise-and-tenon frame design: a 4″ wide compound Aurora in quartersawn white oak (Van Dyke stain) with a simple 1″ beveled sight mould with a carved and parcel gilt sight edge chamfer. The inner molding gives it emphasis, its bevel profile sustaining the wonderful perspective.

I especially love the light in this extraordinary painting by an extraordinary painter.

My last post featured a painting by Oakland landscape painter Carl Sammons (1883-1968), which was on display this past weekend in California Historical Design‘s booth at the National Arts and Crafts Conference at the Grove Park Inn. It was actually one of a pair of 24″ x 30″ Sammonses from the 1920’s that we framed for California Historical Design. So this being no ordinary Tuesday but also “Twosday” (2/22/22), it seemed fitting to post the second of the pair. As you can see, the frame design for this one is similar in approach to the first, but different, each of the two frames carved with patterns adapted to their respective paintings—the peaked crown and zig zag pattern for the rugged mountains and the rounded crown and scalloped corners for the rolling hills. (This one below, showing the Russian River, is available here. The first one, shown at right, “Mt Moran—Jackson Lake—Teton Mountains, Wyoming,” is available here.)

Like the frame on the Mt Moran painting, this one is also a compound made by Trevor Davis in carved quartersawn white oak, 4″ wide, with a carved gilt liner.

This weekend is the 35th Annual National Arts and Crafts Conference at The Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina, and our friend Gus Bostrom of California Historical Design in Alameda once again has a big, beautiful booth displaying antique furniture, pottery, metalwork—and a few notable paintings we framed for him, including this mountain scene by Carl Sammons (1883-1968). The 24″ x 30″ canvas, titled “Mt Moran—Jackson Lake—Teton Mountains, Wyoming,” is from the 1920’s. More on Gus’s site, here.

The compound mitered frame, made by Trevor Davis, is carved quartersawn white oak (Medieval Oak stain) with a pale gold liner. The outer cap molding has a peaked shape to echo the mountain peaks, but which is interrupted at the corners which are flat. The broad, carved inner flat molding nicely echoes the surface of the water. The corners of the flat are raised with a diagonal zig zag pattern.

This is one of a pair of 20″ x 24″ Sammons paintings Gus brought to us and which we framed in similar but different frames. Read about the second one in my next post.

By the way, here’s the frame it came to us in:

Here are more pictures featuring our frames as part of California Historical Design’s display at the Arts and Crafts Conference.

This is Laura Adams Armer’s “Hopi Woman Oraibi Village,” 1929. (I posted on this one here.)

The one at the top left is a terrific Will Sparks from the 1910’s. (More here.)

An oil painting by Charles Warren Eaton (1857-1937), “Entrance to the Woods, Bloomfield, NJ,” ca. 1910 (more here.), hangs above a 1918 watercolor of mountains in Sweden, by Gunnar Mauritz Widforss (more here).

California Historical Design’s website is ACStickley.com.

Have a great show, Gus!

Go to the next post to see the companion to the Sammons painting featured above.

It’s hard to think of another realm today where human beings unleash our imaginations more than we do in science fiction. The Studio recently had the great privilege of framing a painting born of the extraordinary imagination of Croatian artist Milivoj Ćeran, 2018 winner of the European Science Fiction Society‘s Best Artist Award. Known as an illustrator for the massively popular trading card game, Magic: The Gathering, Ćeran is also the creator of “The Norse Mythology Art Book,” for which he painted “Jormungandr.” The story is that Jormungandr is a deep sea serpent who grew so large that he circled the globe and was able to bite his own tail.

Milivoj Ćeran, “Jormungandr,” acrylic and airbrush on paper, 15″ x 23-1/2″.

Such a work of imagination pushed my own creativity. I got a good nudge from the frame actually depicted in the painting: the decorative brass border around a ship’s porthole. (A picture is a window; sometimes it’s a porthole.) From that I came up with the carved 1″ wide bronze powder-rubbed liner. Attempting Ćeran’s masterful knot work would have been foolhardy, and too busy in any case. But a simplified pattern, a serpentine band quietly winding all the way around to resonate with the picture’s subject, felt right.The carving is flat rather than in relief, the pattern simply outlined with a v-shaped carving tool (v-tool) and the background stippled.

The main frame is a 2-1/2″ plain flat profile, but with corners articulated and decorated with a new way of using proud splines: instead of being proud all the way around the corner, the splines are partially recessed. The curves repeat those of the water line, while the slight flair and double points at the corners are echoed and amplified by the splines, the resulting composition of points playing off the spiny monster.

The whole frame is stained quartersawn white oak.

The customer and artist were both pleased. (“The frame is absolutely stunning!,” Mr. Ćeran wrote on a Facebook post with a photo of the piece.) But the crucial thing was to give the great serpent a distinguished, honorific setting that will keep the beast happy. Because, as the story has it, if Jormungandr lets go of his tail, that’s when Ragnarök happens. We can only imagine.

Picture Framing Magazine featured this piece as the Design of the Month in April 2023. More…

Process—

There’s something uniquely rewarding for us in framing Erik Tiemens‘s paintings. The first three here, brand new for Beloved California VI, we set in quartersawn white oak with Dark Medieval Oak stain and gilt slips.

Erik Tiemens, “Cliffs Before the Farallons,” water-soluble wax paint on wood panel, 16″ x 20″.

Why are Erik’s paintings so rewarding to frame? For one thing, his depiction of form always offers something to inspire the shape of the profile. The artist loves to let his imagination play with clouds, the land, and its features—”Cliffs Before the Farallons” being no exception. (It was fun to let the dramatic sweeping coastal geology shape the frame into a nice scoop.) A vigorously creative conversation between his own native California and those landscapes of his artistic forebears in the genre gets filtered through Erik’s masterful rendering skills with which he so beautifully defines gradations.

Erik Tiemens, “Gainsborough’s Path,” water-soluble wax paint on wood panel, 9″ x 12″.

And then there’s the painter’s exceptional ability to paint light that makes the complementary shadow effect of dark wood frames so satisfying to the eye.

There’s also the fact that he and I are so sympatico in regards to the whole understanding of tradition as something to which we belong, and as a great vital well that truly belongs to us all—a view that (contrary to what many seem to believe) is an immeasurable source of creative freedom.

While Erik’s work in the film industry has placed him on the cutting edge of technology, it’s the way the artist revels in art history that best explains his creative genius. That aspect is the focus of an excellent interview with Erik last month in the online art magazine Boldbrush. Below are a few excerpts, beginning with his earliest artistic influences.

Erik Tiemens, “Lagoon of Tranquility,” water-soluble wax paint on wood panel, 9″ x 12″

“I was very fortunate to have a childhood surrounded by art and music… My mom was a ballerina, so I was constantly exposed to dance and classical music as a kid.

At one point she did flamenco dancing as well, so there was a wide variety of cultural influences. There’s something about the rhythms of elaborated concentration in Bach and Mozart that made me want to tap into creativity and make something that was just as beautiful, intuitive, and focused. My expression found itself in the visual arts rather than music, though – when I was seven, my family moved from Los Angeles to the Santa Cruz Mountains and I remember distinctly the change in the light from one place to the other, from the brilliant blown-out light of LA to the cool tree-dappled light of Redwood country. I remember the way the sun would reach over the valley – that strong awareness of light as a sense of place has stayed with me ever since.”

Erik Tiemens, “Pastoral Spring,” water soluble encaustics on wood panel, 5″ x 7″.

Erik, like several of our artists (including Terry Miura who first told me about him), studied at Art Center College of Design, during which time he landed an internship at Disney doing animation layout.

While he enjoyed the work, during his time there he got to see the work of the background painters and realized that was what he really wanted to do. “I was going outside to do plein-air studies on my lunch breaks anyways, and I realized that the background painters were really just doing landscapes—I thought that was an awesome job, painting landscapes for your day job.”

It was just the first step in a stellar career in film and animation. And I do mean “stellar”: Erik went on to work for George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic, where he played a key artistic role in the making of several Star Wars movies.

But [Erik’s always] also wanted to paint as a fine artist, and over the years he has consistently maintained both traditional painting and digital concept art side-by-side as complementaries. “Painting for film design is a very similar skill set to plein-air; you have to work rapidly, catch the light, look at the big shapes and patterns. Over the years I’ve maintained a fairly rigorous plein-air painting practice – I paint outside every week – and I use the knowledge from these studies to inform my concept work as well as my studio landscapes.”

The influences Erik cites reveal him as an artist of enormous artistic appetite. Inspirations he lists include George Inness, Claude Lorraine, Richard Wilson, John Singer Sargent, Joaquin Sorolla, Anders Zorn…

The Impressionists, the Hudson River School, Turner, Constable – the list goes on and on. “In the past ten years, I’ve been going back to the old masters a lot. Van Ruisdael, Rembrandt, Meindert Hobbema. My father is from the Netherlands, so that curiosity to connect to the past is very personal in the case of the Dutch painters. I really love the play of light and dark that is traditional in the Dutch landscape – the clouds casting patterns of shadow on the landscape, the way the composition draws your eye in and through the piece. A few years ago I went to the Netherlands and spent ten days doing a deep dive into the Dutch landscape—hours at the Rijksmuseum, hours roaming the countryside and just geeking out over the way the light and the feel of the land is exactly the way the masters captured it in their work.”

Erik frequents art museums because, he says,

Erik Tiemens, “Dance of the Clouds,” water soluble encaustics on wood panel, 5″ x 7″

“There’s the ‘You are what you eat’ aspect – as an artist you have to immerse yourself in good art in order to create good art! But aside from the aspect of learning technique and style, art history is so important to study because it’s the story of our humanity – every part of culture is filtered through an era’s artwork. I’ve been thinking a lot about the context of landscape painting in our current culture and climate. If you think about it, our national landscape is changing rapidly; the West Coast is increasingly dry and burning, while the East coast is becoming more tropical. In the context of climate change, landscapes become a very precious thing and as a painter I get to remind people of that fact.”

Precious indeed. Erik Tiemens perfectly expresses the spirit of Beloved California VI, running through December 30. Come see Erik’s paintings in person.

Read the whole Boldbrush interview, here…

Visit the artist’s page, here…

Learn more about Erik, including the water soluble encaustics he paints with...

I could sing the praises of many aspects of Kim Lordier‘s 20″ x 24″ pastel “Test of Time,” beginning with the wonderful treatment of morning sunlight. But it’s the expertly rendered perspective that inspired this frame design—a surround to simply extend and amplify the force field Kim created to pull us into this iconic old California farm and its stories.Perspective—artists since Maurice Denis (1870-1943) have rebelled against the rules of perspective and argued for painters to think of a painting as a flat surface on which to arrange shapes and colors. The idea, foundational to modernism, was often promoted in the name of artistic freedom. Fair enough. But it’s hard to think of anything more freeing—not only to the eye but to the mind and soul—than breaking through the walls, the confines, of a room by making windows. As works like “Test of Time” demonstrate, the power of perspective will always captivate us—an indispensable ingredient in the illusion of another world seen through the plain of the wall. Perspective both draws us in to that world and, reciprocally, brings that world to us.

In any case, a painting with powerful perspective is a blessing to the framer, who gets to complete the painter’s illusion with the architectural trim we expect to see around a window, and to deliver that imagined world seemingly beyond the wall into the reality of the viewer’s world.

The 4″ wide carved and stained quartersawn white oak frame made by Trevor Davis is a scoop with a complementary carved cushion element at the sight edge, finished off with a gilt slip. Like the frame for Richard Lindenberg’s “Sonoma Coast” in my last post, it has a deep back that coves out beyond the outside edge of the frame’s face.

From the fragrance of the dry grass in the foreground to the dreamy clouds and eternal blue sky over the Pacific Ocean beyond the horizon, Kim’s masterful perspective offers us transcendence. We’d be fools not to accept it.

Come experience Kim Lordier‘s “Test of Time”—as well as her 12″ x 9” “Cypress Cove Dance,” at right—in “Beloved California VI: Twenty Painters with a Passion for Place.” Jessie did an excellent job hanging the show last week, and we had a terrific opening this past Saturday with much admiration expressed by attendees. I hope you’ll come see the exhibit. It’s on through the end of the year. (To view it and purchase work online, click here…)

Kim Lordier and Jessie Dunn-Gilbert, Gallery Director, at the opening of Beloved California VI, with ”Test of Time” in the background.

Our big annual all-gallery show opens today! Beloved California VI: Twenty Painters with a Passion for Place features more than 60 wonderful works by our entire roster of Northern California landscape painters. Nearly all the paintings are on view in the gallery for the first time.

With so many beautiful paintings to choose from, it wasn’t easy to decide which to put on the postcard and poster (at right) advertising the exhibition. But we finally settled on Richard Lindenberg‘s 24″ x 24″ painting “Sonoma Coast.” Its grandeur perfectly expresses the spirit of the exhibition. Only one little problem: it needed a frame that was up to that grandeur. So Trevor made this 4″ wide carved cushion complemented with a narrow low cove at the sight edge, and punctuated with a parcel gilt chamfer. The frame’s nice and deep, with an elegant cut in back that sweeps out beyond the outside edge of the face. The profile was designed to serve the rounded but rugged forms that Richard captured so beautifully.

Again, Beloved California VI opens today—the weatherman promises clear, sunny skies!—with an open house from 1 to 4. We hope you’ll come! (Masks and vaccines required. Number of guests allowed inside at one time limited to twenty.) Visit the Beloved California VI webpage to see the entire show, including several others by Richard Lindenberg.

I love the prints Yoshiko Yamamoto made as a tribute to the Overbeck sisters, Hannah (1870-1931) and Mary (1878-1955). This one, “Holly,” is based on a circa 1915 watercolor and ink drawing in the Los Angeles County Museum, shown at right. (In typical humble fashion, Yoshiko dutifully included the Overbeck name on the prints and did not see fit to sign it herself. It is, nonetheless, a true block print made by Yoshiko.) This holly print (7-1/2″ x 6″ image size, 13-1/2″ x 11″ outside frame dimensions) is one we just had to frame up to offer for the holidays this year. I shaped the corners of the walnut frame to echo the holly leaves. Archivally framed in a cream colored rag mat and Museum Glass. $350.