Wednesday May 23rd was the Happiest Day of the Year! Why you ask? The Annual Oak Park River Forest High School Student Art Show debuted at Frame Warehouse. Each year Frame Warehouse donates the framing for the top 25 Student Artists.
The show travels to the Cheney Mansion for the summer and moves to OPRF for the school year. At the end of the year the students get to take their framed art home!
This wonderful late 19th century floral still life on board came to us dirty, with paint scratches, paint chips and discolored varnish. You can see what appears to be the effects of either a coal heat or a smoking environment evident in the swaths of black across the painting.
However, our patient conservator cleaned the oil painting, touching up chips and scratches along the way, and revarnished the image. Now the purple flowers are vibrant in color, you can see details in the two bees, and the overall painting is now brighter.
At Frame Warehouse we can work with you to restore family heirlooms like this one painted on board or any canvas painting you might have.
P.S.: One customer brought in an an extremely dirty oil portrait on board of her Uncle that she had inherited. After cleaning the signature of the artist appeared in the lower right hand corner: Leroy Neiman
In December this year we are highlighting the work of four local artists at our Evanston store.
They have exhibited all over the North Shore and their work will be on display and for sale.
Please stop in to see the beautiful work of these great artists.
Sally Wille Watercolor
Ilze Arajs Photography
Kat Knuth Watercolor
Pat Rose Charcoal
This antique print Pilgrimage to Canterbury was published in London in 1817.
On the reverse side are the pencil marks of a rare print dealer who framed and sold it around 1900. Not knowing about the acids in wood the framer at that time put a couple of scraps of paper behind the print then backed it with thin sheets of pine wood. Highly acidic.
You can see from the first photo that the acid from the wood has leached through the back of the print and severely discolored large portions of the image. In this case the print was removed from the frame and de-acidfied. This process brought out more of the original color of the print.
In the photo above you can see the print after it has been de-acidfied and mounted to linen. We will return it to it’s original frame and use Museum Plexiglass and acid free backing to preserve it for it’s next 200 years.
This rare vintage World War One poster came to us in pieces recently. Many posters from WW1 and WW2 have subject matter that transcend the fighting aspect of war and have visuals and content that can enlighten and inspire us today.
This is one such image.
We want to share with you what we can achieve with vintage paper restoration and how remarkable the transformation can be in expert hands.
The art of archival restoration of torn paper by linen mounting posters is not well known. Many people, when they find a torn vintage poster, pass it by.
However, remarkable and relatively inexpensive restoration can be undertaken to make any image, like the one above, beautiful again.
Please contact our Oak Park store to discuss your project today.
Frame Warehouse
Mon. - Fri: 9 AM - 6 PM
Saturday: 9 AM - 5 PM
Sunday: Closed
M, Tu, Th and F: 10 AM - 5 PM
Wednesday: Closed
Saturday: 10 AM - 5 PM
Sunday: Closed
