Pauvre Petits

Todays special, slush. Poor Bears. The great blizzard of February 26-27 seems to have sidled on by leaving a thin layer of slush. Not much frame posting, though I am working, slowly, on a post about sharpening. Mostly, I've been spending extra time wrestling with my main website, and a very buggy email program, both of which have had problems. I've abandoned Apples Mail for Postbox, and so far it works the way it should. The Apple program kept losing not only my settings, but also being sulky about connecting properly, even when the settings were reinstalled. PFUI. I've used both Windows and Apple, and like Apple products, but .... they too, fall down.

Slush and fog. Our weather alternates from slushy meltdowns, to frigid fluffy snow, then back.

And a photo of the Saint Joseph river from our downtown South Bend Convention and Museum of Art building. The structures in the foreground are part of the race and dam complex, upstream to the right, originally providing power.

Interesting behavior

A few days ago, as the sun was starting to set, a cauldron of crows came flying easterly, and at a certain point, they seemed to all alight in the tree tops, where they turned to the west, as if one moment in the setting of the sun is the best part, and they all had to stop and watch.

That's all.

Addenda: 1-23-13

They were only in the tree about a minute, before gradually flying off to wherever they were going.

Black Beast

Sanding, .... gahhh! Every time I've had an employee, I think sanding is what has driven them out the door. Of course, my gentle personality could have some effect. ( I have been told that I have a certain intensity, that might be intimidating to some. )

Above, cutting sandpaper to size. I use a cheap paper cutter, with marks for the division of the sandpaper as to my needs. The marks are to make it a no-think operation, and also because the cutter is not well aligned to the back fence.

In the can at the left are some of the rubber sanding blocks of various shapes; the combination of concave and convex means any element of a molding may be efficiently sanded. The can in the rear has a collection of "flats" for sanding flat areas, as well as some "pads" that can be bent to conform to large coves, etc. At right, my sandpaper of choice, 100 grit, the short side conforming to the length of my sanding blocks. 100 is my main grit; occasionally progressing to 150 or 220. For water gilding, I'll go to 220 on the burnished areas. For metal leaf work 100 is fine enough, as there will be at least three coats of shellac after sanding, with the first shellac coat being pigmented. Covers a multitude of sins.

Sanding is the Black Beast, Bête Noire, Bugaboo, Bane, Bogeyman, ... well, you get the drift; the combination of the back and forth, gesso dust sucking moisture from your skin; I've had fingers split in summer, though winter is the worst. Frustrating, too, as you think that spot is done, then vacuum off the dust, pfui. Good music helps; sometimes really loud, good music. Sanding is the mind numbing, repetitive evil of frame making; seldom creative, though an essential part of the process. It's where the messy gets cleaned up enough to go out in public. And that gesso dust, floating through the air, everything with a fine dusting of powdered .... gesso. In your nose, eyes, hair, and that is with a good dust extraction set-up. Above my main bench is an enormous filtration unit, and there are various exhaust fans, but dust  ....  is just in the air.

The sanding blocks only go so far, too. At some point the sandpaper gets folded, and the fingers are the block, as one tries to make that pigs ear of botched molding, recalcitrant lumber, and errant carving into the princess it was meant to be ......

Crow

More seasonals, Updated 3:30 PM

Crows

The "season" of "gloom" has been bright and sunny for parts of the last few days. Above, from this morning. Yes, there are two crows. Loud, raucous, even, though elusive, and in abundance.

Addenda, 3:30 PM: A "cauldron"of crows, a "congress" of crows, etc. etc. from the great app iBird.
The app is available for iOS, Android, and some forms of Windows. Highly recommended! And, playing the bird songs gets the cats all wound up! Bonus feature. 8-)

And one from this past summer. Now that the girls are back in school, I'll start posting some more, and maybe on the subject of framing, and techniques thereof.

Bron

Still Here.

Another seasonal (see previous post). This would appear to be the season of "gloom". 8-)

Not much snow, but on the streets it has been packed into ice, and has melted and frozen on the walks, making for treacherous walking.

Wintertrax.

Posts, or lack there of ...

I haven't been posting much lately; busy, good, and a little money helps. The above photo is one of my "seasonal" images, used mainly as wall paper on my phone. Here are a few more, in no order:

Cross Grain Fluting

An example of a frame with cross grain fluting, in the large cove.

On this frame, where the beads are incised, fluting with the grain. Most of the fluting I've seen on antique frames has appeared hand carved, though it would not surprise me if there were some fluting engines available in the 19th. century. If they could come up with the Stanley 55, a fluting engine shouldn't have been too difficult.

I'll leave the 55 for another post, and concentrate on how I mark out and carve fluting.

These are some of my marking "gauges" for drawing the lines for the fluting.

And, here we see one of the gauges in action. The blue tape has been applied as a handle, to facilitate moving the gauge. I start with flat sheet metal; in the example above, that's from an old aluminium license plate. Being careful to keep the bend at a right angle to the edge, I clamp the metal in a metal working vise, and bend and hammer the "fence" of the gauge in. The  shape is done by clamping different sizes of pipe in the vise and bending the metal over the pipe. A certain amount of hand fitting is required. The holes in the gauge can be used as a measure for the next line, or as I have done above, measure can be marked off of a ruler.

The horizontal line is the starting point for carving the flutes. Above, the inner part of the cove will be overlaid with an inner frame, so there is no end point.

Carving, now there's the rub. Depending on the size of the flutes, the size of the molding being fluted, I may be able to use a straight gouge, or it may require a bent gouge. Bent gouges come in a variety of shapes, some having a tight bend, near the edge, and some with a long, sweeping bend. I practice on scrap pieces of the molding, to work out size, and which tool I will use. If I need to lever the gouge against the frame, I will add a very thin piece of wood with double sided tape, to prevent marring the molding. Depending on the wood itself, I can often carve a flute in a single pass, or it may take little bites to complete one flute. Usually, a few passes are needed; the initial one and then several clean up passes. I do minimal sanding and filing, preferring to get a few coats of gesso on, and then do the sanding and filing. I use a variety of files, rifflers, and little sanding blocks that I custom make. Seldom can I use one method for an entire frame, as there will be hard areas, soft, grainy and not, needing different tools to accomplish the same end. 

Studying antique frames closely, reveals the "hand", some waver, wiggle and tilt, but from a proper viewing distance, all is well, the little irregularities disappearing. Besides they indicate "hand" and character. I'll save my thoughts on "hand" and it's place in ones own time and culture, for another post.

Photography and Memory

Image of a frame I made about 7 years ago. I've never liked the photo, and because of that, not liking the photo, I've had somewhat negative feelings about the frame itself. The above is my latest attempt at potatochopping the image into something I like, and I'm still not satisfied. This previous weekend, I went to an exhibition on the art of George Ames Aldrich at the Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University. There, I saw this frame and another of the same pattern on two Aldrich paintings. In person, I liked the frames far more than I had remembered. I have noted this as a phenomenon; I'm never quite pleased with my work until some time has passed. Then, an opportunity arises for me to see the work again, and with a few exceptions, I'm far more pleased with how the frames look than memory served.

Being self-critical is important for the quality of the work, and is a part of the process. Near the end of the carving, I'll hang the frame in viewing position, walk away, do other things, so I can see the frame with fresh eyes. Changing which leg is up is a part of that, and often leads to refinements, and catching subtle errors.

And it is enriching for my ego, to be looking at a piece of art, think it's nicely framed, and then recognize it as my own work. I knew that in an Aldrich exhibit, there would be some of my frames, but these were a surprise, as I have often done frames without ever seeing the actual art. In this case, I actually had to study the frames for awhile, including looking at the label to see ownership, before deciding that, yes, they were mine.

Curmudging

Early Sunday Morning

Edward Hopper

Whitney Museum of American Art

My comment in the previous post needs some elaboration. It has become a cliche of art speak to compare certain kinds of images to the work of Edward Hopper. I, personally am offended for Hopper's sake, as it seems dismissive of him that any "hack job" can be compared to his work. In much the same way that certain aspects of Andrew Wyeth's work have been copied into being a cliche, the rustic aspects of rural decrepitude were for Wyeth, portraits of the people who inhabited that decrepitude, and these were people he was intimately involved with for long periods of time, not just some rustic ruin he happened upon.

In other news, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, has started putting online, some of their publications, with some of the out of print items available for download as PDFs. Of interest to framers is this one: Italian Renaissance Frames

A resource to be explored.

And from Richard Christie, Framemaker, a link to another resource: The Frame Blog

On Art

Approaching Fog

Over on TOP, here, and here, there have been several posts with some good commentary about the work of Doug Rickard in the book "A New American Picture". His work rephotographs and manipulates Google street view images.

Some of my thoughts:

Why is every slightly “lonely” street photo compared to Edward Hopper, when the compared work has none of the psychological or emotional investment Hopper imbued his work with?

I have a pretty loose definition of Art; it can be built on a foundation of 10,000 hours of technical skill and craft, or not. It can come from the hand of a child (Picasso had some thoughts about that) or even the wave action of a great body of water, but it is transcendent of it’s material origins.

I think it’s Art, therefore it is.

As to Rickard's work, I’m ambivalent about the concept, and thus the work, because it is so removed from the actual reality, and seems emotionally distant. Quite the opposite of Edward Hopper. I have the same response to much marble sculpture; it rarely is the hand of the artist who designed the maquette. Michelangelo's David is a notable exception. I guess I like more personal involvement, even if the "hand" is Lake Michigan sculpting a piece of driftwood.

But, as I say, there are some good thoughts on the nature of personal involvement in Art.

I reserve the right to be completely inconsistent. 8-)

Bron

Today, Sept. 21

Today, amid the usual bloody detritus of human history, a small brightness. In 1937, The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien, was first published in England.

Dust cover, designed by Tolkien, for the first edition.

Some Attic Windows

I haven't posted any attic windows for a while, so ....

 Front and back views of a Swiss chalet inspired house.

And just across the street. The "Swiss" house was built for an executive at Studebaker. No info on the other house, a conventional late Victorian., with a really nice carriage house in the back.