09/07/2026
The thing I love about our artists is that they are so thoughtful and passionate about their work. Sometimes I feel inadequate to the task of enhancing their work, after all, I am a humble craftsman, self taught, with all the gaps and insecurities that come with that. Here’s a salute to Durhl, and all our other artists, that pursue excellence so admirably!
THE FRAME CAME FIRST
That is not a photograph of an empty frame.
That is a photograph of a decision.
It has been hanging on my studio wall for a while now with nothing in it. People walk past it and ask when I'm going to put a painting in there. The honest answer is: when the painting has earned it.
Most people assume the frame is the last step. You finish the painting, you go find something to put around it, you hang it. I work the other way. I chose this frame before the painting existed as anything more than an idea. Before the composition. Before the first stroke of umber. The frame was the first decision, and everything after it had to live up to it. (The frame was hand crafted by a true artisan, at 1642 Designs, thank you Philip for your support and craftsmanship.
Here is why that matters.
You can walk into any big-box store tomorrow and buy a 24x36 frame for forty dollars. It will hold a painting. It will not honor one. It is extruded polystyrene wrapped in a printed foil that imitates wood grain, mitered by a machine that has never once considered what is going inside it. Put six months of hand-ground glazes into that and you have told your viewer exactly what you think the work is worth.
A frame is not packaging. It is the last layer of the painting. It is the doorway the viewer walks through to get to the image, and if the doorway is cheap, the room feels cheap before they ever look up.
When I was in New York, at The Frick and The Met I went to see 17th-century Dutch frames in person. Not photographs of them. The actual objects, three hundred and some years old, hanging in the same rooms as the paintings they were built for. Ebonized pearwood. Ripple molding running in unbroken waves around the sight edge. I stood there far longer than I stood in front of some of the paintings, and I am not embarrassed to admit it.
That ripple molding is the thing that gets me. Those undulating waves are not carved by hand and they are not stamped. They are cut on a wave molding machine — a device invented in the late 1500s where the stock is drawn across a fixed blade while riding over a shaped template, so the cutter rises and falls and leaves a rhythm in the wood. Every pass has to be identical. Every length has to match at the corner. Get the timing wrong and the wave stumbles, and once you see it stumble you cannot unsee it.
Look closely at the photograph. The stepped corners are Flemish, doubled — the profile breaks outward and steps back twice on every corner, which means each of those steps is a separate joint that has to close perfectly and stay closed. The lighter panels are burl veneer, laid in by hand, then glazed in burnt sienna and worked until the figure in the wood came up warm and honeyed like tortoiseshell. Then waxed. Then burnished.
That is not a weekend of work. That is a craftsman who apprenticed for years before he was allowed to touch a piece like this, working a method that has been passed down largely unchanged since Rembrandt's lifetime. There is no shortcut. There is no software for it. There is a person, a bench, hand tools, and time.
Which is exactly why it belongs around my work.
I paint on hand-prepared linen panels. I use Michael Harding and Natural Pigments oils because the pigment load is real and the color will still be true in a hundred years. I check every mixture against the Munsell system. I build the picture the old way — umber ground, grisaille, dead layer, then glaze over glaze, fat over lean, waiting on each one to dry.
If I am going to do all of that, and then hang it in plastic, what was the point of any of it?
So the frame comes first. The frame sets the standard, and then I go try to meet it.
Something is coming for this one. It has been on the easel for months, it is the largest and most ambitious thing I have attempted, and it is closer than it has ever been.
And behind it, something darker is already being built. A nocturne. A single raking light. Objects that have something to say about time.
I am not showing either one yet.
But this frame is not going to stay empty much longer.
Painted the old way. For those who know why that matters.
