I made this frame and that has taken two point five years from start to finish. And bar one fixable typo, I got it right! Such a thing happens!

The inspiration. The cabinet at right, black & gold lacquer. Seriously, I saw that and it started all this…

William Holman Hunt, The finding of the Saviour in the Temple, 1854-56 Birmingham City Art Gallery. More background here

This is a frame in the Pre Raphaelite style, an ‘attributive” frame, where it is considered a part of the artwork, with both image and frame contributing the artwork’s meaning and intention. There is a God of such things, the Hot Lord: Holman Hunt. I love that guy. Also Millais, Charles Allston Collins, Ford Madox Brown and crowd favourite, D.G. Rossetti

This gates and fences motif is a classic “Chinoiseries” style

The artwork residing in my frame (chickens and eggs), is oils on canvas with 22 carat gold and 12 carat white gold leaf, aluminium and composition metal leaf, shellac and oil size.

The title is “After the Rain”, which refers to memories of the nightly tropical thunderstorms in Bogor, West Java and the mirroring of the scene to the periods in my life that came before, and after, we lived there, with my father’s sudden, shocking death having caused us a new life in Australia. There was definitely a before and after. Even though I was the same person, I never matched up. The schism was profound and I’m still chasing it. West Java is an incredibly beautiful place, my Camelot, and as a 12 year old, I found the Brisbane suburbs of the 1980’s to be a very far remove. I was foreign inside and out. But enough of the tropics remained so that every time it rained I felt connected to something that I’d lost but I couldn’t catch it in my hand, it was quicksilver.

Gates and fences. Lines we cross, ways taken, exits & entrances.

While there are many forms of creative expression, for me it has been making pictures through memories and emotional trauma, and I believe that processing such pain is likely understood and felt by many other humans; while my autobiographical details remain with me, some stories are shared. Loss. Grief. Beauty. Time. And change, which leads us back to Time. I didn’t set out to have things this way, its just how it happened for me

I came upon this design & determined to make what I needed to make

Designing involves lots of numerations, which took forever, and then a lot longer. But I learnt a lot

In the tradition of black & gold lacquerware, my initial plan was gold powder stencilling. Excellent book above available on Google Books, the definitive work on the subject.

The process is

cover the surface in varnish
let it dry to a tack finish
then place the stencil on it and rub gold powder into it

Like this:…

Not good enough. I dont like it. Cant bear it. Set a match to it.

From the book. Encouraged, I tried again.

A second, smaller one that went like this…

It took a lot of work to fail at this. Not happy. Not Chopin. Shelved it. For years.

But I still wanted it! A long time later I converted the design to a solid shape for laser cutting. I love laser cutting.

Inkscape = opensource Illustrator. I heart Inkscape, learning comes quickly theres heaps of info & three great tutorials on the basics on the help tab. The trouble is remembering what is what in between sessions

I love laser cutting! Online laser cutting, I love you so much

Blow me down if it wasnt correct. It was PERFECT, I AM STILL AMAZED.

Make a mold of the laser cut pieces IMMEDIATLY

I ‘discovered’ that packing tape is a game changing part of mold making, no more PVA or glue needed to hold everything down, just secure some tape with the sticky side up onto the bench and voila, stuck down it is. Make the walls and pour! I had a roll of random red contact film which upgraded the concept as seen above. Masking tape the film to the bench or whatever surface you have, with the sticky side up. Boom. Little deflated to find I wasn’t the first to figure it out

Next morning, nice molds. Pinkysil can demold after about half an hour if you need it to.

Late night. First pour to clean out the molds. Easycast with yellow dye. I tend to dye everything yellow or yellowish because I’m always gilding and its less obvious where the gold has ‘skipped’ if underneath best matches the gold colour.

Perfect castings. Pretty late at night now., but they couldn’t wait

In the end I made upward of 40 casts. My molds were pretty crapped out by the time I made those numbers

I spent a lot of time considering the colouring. Its impossible to successfully gild every vertical so I went with colouring and coating the resin then gilding the top surface

Brushing the mold with gold powder to coat the side walls and pouring clear resin with gold powder added. Its not shiny gold but it passes without looking out of place. I developed an ingenious method for gilding the top horizontal surface. Or a common sense one, depending on how charitably it’s being viewed (ingenious).

Pre clean up, exited to try them on! I do like it very much.

Some castings ready for gilding. Because I’m using oil size, I do them in batches so my open time isnt too stretched.

Note this is composition metal leaf, or imitation gold leaf. No one would be this wasteful with gold-gold, have you seen how much that costs??

I used a hard brayer to roll on the gold size, then applied the leaf, placed some silicone paper on top of that to shield the leaf and then rolled over with the brayer so contact is only on that horizontal surface. Its not being pushed down into the walls. Oil size only because acrylic size is a world of sticky regret. The oil dries off hard so clean edges are possible, there’s always cleaning to do but imagine if every edge was gummy & caked in balled up leaf. Shudder.

A soft shoe-shine brush was great to clean up & sometimes a blade to scrape along some edges so the cleaning wasn’t too bad. Still, it takes time.

Gold powder finish on left, versus gilded on right. I rest my case.

Applying them had to be immaculate. I started with string lines but that just got in the way so I tore them off in an angry way and made a little template from card that kept the distance from the outside edge to the ornament the same. Easy! Cant believe it was so simple but then not everything has to be hard?

I designed this frame at very specific dimensions, the width of the top, bottom and sides are different to exacting proportions. The ornament is on the top and sides only, so I designed a regular section, a corner piece and an end cap piece for the termination at sides. I wanted some text at the bottom.

Unfortunately I made a mistake and should have made two individual corner pieces. So they are mirrored. See above that they are not, the center ‘basket’ is going in different directions. Fortunately I used the right glue so I prised the left piece off without damaging the frame. Flipped a spare corner piece over, gilded it, glued it on, and tah-dah but not that excited because the joy was gone a bit. Now I look at it again and decide that I should’ve taken the right hand piece off and replaced it instead, so the baskets are both horizontal to differentiate from the end baskets which are vertical as I had intended, but also decide I am sad, and will change this on the next one I make. Also expect one hundred more frames with this ornament, to say I am invested in it is to understate the situation. I have an urge to make some fluorescent pink ones. I really do.

Time check: 11.15pm. This piece has a lot longer to go.

AT THE END OF THE DAY or at 11.57pm, decide it is a good frame

Time check: February 2021, when I designed this frame, with the ingenious (again!) method of canvas insertion

The plaque is another blow to the patriarchy because back when only men could be painters and have their big paintings in big galleries they often labelled their work in case…another man claimed them or something? Big important man painters had man ideas so who the fuck knows