Rowley Gallery Blog
These are three frames we made recently, containing a triptych made out of various wine and champagne corks, depicting the pixelated figure of a reclining nude. They are seen here at one of the restaurants where the corks were collected. If I’m not mistaken that looks like a Richard Smith painting on the wall behind, so I’m guessing this is The Boundary in Shoreditch. Continue reading “What A Corker!”
Jazmin Velasco brought us these gouache portrait paintings of some of her Georgian heros and heroines. She’s framed them in pressed metal frames from Mexico, frames more often used for painted votive offerings to the saints (see also Mexican Miracle Paintings). Reading left to right and top to bottom they are Duke of Wellington; George Frideric Handel; Queen Charlotte; Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire; Lord Nelson and King George III. They would make very good miniature pub signs for very good miniature pubs. Here’s a link to what Jazmin wrote when she painted them.
Santo Spirito. Vino Liquoroso. Firenze. Spirit of the Picture Frame.
A young couple, framed by trees, walk the line down the tunnel of love, a two mile long section of railway near the town of Klevan in the Ukraine. A train runs down it three times a day. They’d better watch out for the Love Train!
This photograph is another from the Guardian’s Eyewitness series.
This naked painting, looking a little ragged around the edges, was brought to us for framing. It is by Anna Marinova, an oil on canvas titled Model With Mirror. Continue reading “Getting Dressed”
A folding map of the City of London, published in 1900 by the cartographer G W Bacon & Co. We framed it with an elegant oak moulding and a French mount of acid-free boards. Continue reading “A Symmetrical Frame”
How many times have I gone into a good gallery and seen badly presented work? Very rarely, because believe it or not, gallery owners and buyers really care about that stuff. Unfortunately I know a fair few artists who don’t. They create wonderful work but then their frames are falling apart, the mounts aren’t cut straight or the print margins are ink-smudged. Continue reading “Because Your Work Is Worth It?”
This was my favourite from the Mondrian & Nicholson exhibition. It is from the Courtauld Gallery’s permanent collection and very likely the inspiration for the In Parallel exhibition. There is a gentle spiralling movement to the forms in this hard-edged but soft-toned painting by Ben Nicholson. It brings to mind The Snail by Henri Matisse, though that came 16 years later. Continue reading “1937 (painting)”
Ten years ago I received a strange email marked ‘cacklegoose’. Curious both because the author was nameless but more so due to she? he? offering ‘artistic material’ in the form of 328 razor blades. Further corresponding revealed it was from the writer and publisher Michael Raeburn of Cacklegoose Press. When his father, Walter Raeburn, died in 1972 Michael discovered a box of all the razor blades he’d used since the late 1920s along with the well worn razor in its purple velvet-lined case. Continue reading “A Good Shave”
A long-limbed family tree painting on paper, so wide that standard picture frame moulding was not long enough and we had to have the lengths for this frame specially cut. It measured 3.2 metres long and 1 metre high and it was glazed with ultraviolet filter acrylic.