April 29, 2008
Los Angeles, CA
Over the last few weeks I have been trying hard to learn certain terminologies used by framers and in the framing business. We are down to the wires here a bit. I need to have all of my pieces (11, including one at 7 feet x 2.5 feet) framed and to New York in the next couple of weeks here. So I have been trying to understand the difference in price and workmanship and what am I really looking at here when one framer can do a job for $90 and another needs $260 for the same thing.
I have always been a believer of quality and paying for said quality but when you have over 20 piece to frame and you are hoping to at least make some of your money back when you finally sell a piece or two – $90 seems to be the way to go. But I digress. What no one told me whilst in my effort to educate myself about framing is that the $90 framer is buying pre-made, pre-stained frames from a supplier and the $260 framer is making it all by hand himself. Now, that I understand! Why didn’t anyone just tell me that to begin with?
I was made aware of this essayist Megan Daum over the weekend at the LA Times Festival of Books and subsequently picked up one of her books. In the forward of this collection of Essays, “My Misspent Youth” she says that she is not “a person who keeps a journal. Instead, I;m inclined to catalog my experiences and turn them over in my head until some kind of theme emerges and I feel I can link the personal banalities to something larger and worth telling.” I think that is perhaps how Don’s mind works. Where as I am the opposite. I keep a journal, not everyday, but enough, and I like to catalog certain events as if the act of doing so will provide me with insight and an objective view to the individual events. Now and then, patterns emerge out of the series of banalities and I am attempted to try to grasp onto the pattern but then I think that perhaps I am overreaching and over interpreting. Or as my therapist would say – that I was projecting out the patterns to exert control over the situation. She was a therapist who was all about teaching her patients that they have no control and that shit just happens. I think its a good thing that I quiet seeing her.
