The Framers Forum

This frame fell off the wall and just missed a child. Tight cord and clip frame clips slid over the backing board, held in with the sealing tape, the side you see isn't the one that failed, I pulled it out, very very easily.
Customer has no idea of value but reckons 'collectible' - the bottom rail was hanging off so I removed it in front of customer, being against glass was bad enough but it is also dry mounted. Did the (retail - high street) framer mention space from glass (not that there's any room in this frame)? No. Did s/he tell you s/he was going to stick it to a (grey) board? No.

Our conservation depoartment get a lot of urban art from London.

We've seen a lot of pieces requesting full conservation framing (because that's the done thing) except the artist hadn't considered what s/he's doing the art work on.

All the conservation in the world won't protect a piece of art that will eat itself.

benjiman grapes wrote: All the conservation in the world won't protect a piece of art that will eat itself.

Could not agree more and this is a factor that a lot of folks (inc framers) don't consider.

Recently re-framed a very nice set of bird drawings by Dr.Eric Ennion. I've always been a big fan of the man being a birdy painter myself, so this was a dream job. Especially satisfying to get them out of the black hogarth frames.
They were done around 1970 and most were on coloured mountboard. On removing them from the original mounts I found the colour of the board was quite a lot away from what it started as. Delicate grey had turned to warm brown. This was obviously UV that had caused the shift as under the mounts it looked OK. They didn't look too bad on the whole - no foxing or acid burn. Probably because the board was just as acidic as the window mounts. But it's not the colour background that the artist chose, which is a pity as there is not way on earth that it could be returned to it's original colour.
The best one was on a thinner piece of browny card. On inspecting the back I realised that it was part of the front cover of a Daler sketchbook.
I suppose in those days people paid little heed to longevity of their works. No excuse today.

This isn't one of them, but very similar.




Robo's kamikaze frame is quite typical of a lot of stuff "it fell off the wall" that comes to my door. Had one the other week - a double sided map in very diddly gold hockey stick. Not enough meat in the moulding to fix hangers in to take the weight of two pieces of glass. By some miracle the frame wasn't damaged, but on inspecting it for sprung corners found that it had never been glued. Just one shallow v-nail. In fact I pulled it apart in front of the customer with no effort at all. It's now a one-sided map with glued corners and much better hangers.

Interesting - but little to do with the first post - outgassing forum is quiet!

Yeah. You can usually hear it hissing on a still night.

The best one I've had was a customer coming in with a handful of bits wanting a print reframed. D rings had been rivited into a backing board and cord attached, trouble was it was a big picture. Loud crash in the middle of the night - they found a backing board hanging perfectly on the wall, print, frame, mount and glass strewn down the stairs.

They were lucky!

Best one I 'ad was 't frame was sooooooooooooooooooo heavy that it pulled 't wall away from 't ceiling and whole house fell dahn, bar't wall picture was on.

Remember the incident well. That old geezer shouldn't have been carrying all them sticks.

we had one of these too

customer couldn't understand why her 20 x 24 Arqadia swept with bevel mirror in didn't stick to the wall with blu tak!!!

apparently is was a big ball of blu-tak

got a restoration job though!

These sort of poor quality framing jobs can be helpful sources of income and being located in a retirement area means that there are new people moving in on a fairly regular basis and it seems to me that a good many framed pictures get broken in transit.

Of course, it's the removals company which gets blamed, but I find that many were about ready to fall apart and did not take much to finish the job. Quite often, if repairing the original frame is not a realistic course of action, then I get another framing job.

Many people, who move to rural Devon have no idea that their houses can become damp when the decide to save money on the heating bills, as lots of them decide to do. As a result I get yet asked to sort out the effects of mould and damp, particularly where items have been framed with MDF backs and no undermount.

I wonder how many of us would manage without the extra income resulting from misfortunes resulting from undesireable framing practices. In my own case, conservation, restoration and repair work has become an important part of my business and a very helpful extra income source for my business.

I feel sorry for future framers, with all these conservation jobs there will soon be no work left!