Path to the Sea, 6 x 12, Pastelbord
This is the small painting that I mentioned last week in the post about pastel bliss. As I said, it is a quiet picture, but I managed to add a lot of color that wasn’t there. I intended the center of interest to be where the path leads into the distance. The clump of grasses on the left grabs the eye and hopefully leads it into the background, as does the strong diagonal of grasses on the right. I used blue violet in the snow in the foreground (barely visible on my monitor) and warmer colors in the snow in the middle. I think this makes a big difference in the actual painting. Took it and others for my October show in Bethesda to my framer’s yesterday. Decided to frame this by attaching to a black mat and floating an off-white mat around it with 3/8th” of black showing. Will use a small, flat black frame. It creates quite a distinctive look and the floating mat allows the entire surface to show. It works very nicely for boards like this.
That’s a very interesting way to frame this piece. I’d like to see just how it looks once it’s framed. I don’t think I’ve seen this treatment before. Thanks for sharing.
Linda–I’ll take a picture of it when I get it back and put it on the blog. I developed this style of framing some years ago when I was routinely working on gatorfoam boards. I had the framer mount it on an appropriate white mat and then float a second mat on top of the spacers, leaving room for the first mat to show. In this way, you get the entire surface plus a double matted look. I used a beautiful “taupe” Larson-Juhl frame that really looked great. But it was expensive and made the pictures much bigger and harder to store. For my bigger pictures (11 x 14 and up) now, I tend to use plein air frames. I order them from Hartford Frames and they come in boxes. I particularly like the silver, which has a lovely light gold look and the black. But I think that small pictures need more room to breath.
Thank you, Jean. That is very helpful. Lynda