Retail and Hospitality - Picture Framer  

Creating a Straw Picture Frame

 Primary

Australian Curriculum General Capability: Critical and creative thinking

1. You are going to create a straw picture frame by following the directions in the following video.

2. YouTube: How to Craft a Duct Tape Straw Picture Frame:

DIY - Instructions to making this...

Primary

Australian Curriculum General Capability: Critical and creative thinking

1. Look at the following photograph of a newspaper crafted frame

2. You are to create the steps to show your partner how to make it. This is to include:

• Size

• Materials needed

• Process steps

3. Test it out! What would you add to make the steps easier for you to understand?

Optional challenge

Look at the following more complicated picture frame and create the steps to complete this task. Hint it is also made from newspapers.

Art Works and the Art of Framing

Middle Secondary

Australian Curriculum General Capability: Literacy

Australian Curriculum General Capability: Critical and creative thinking

Australian Curriculum General Capability: Intercultural Understanding

Australian Curriculum General Capability: Personal and social capability

1. You are to analyse the following article from the great auction house Christie's about the Art of Framing:

Look especially at the following two paragraphs:

Frames are the Cinderellas of the art world; they do a tremendous amount of work. They protect the artworks they support; they show off the qualities of a picture, drawing attention to its formal structure, its patterns and colours, enabling them to resonate fully with a viewer; they mould the response of the viewer to the work by suggesting the value we should attach to it; they accommodate a painting to its setting, acting as a liaison between the dream world of art and the decorative scheme of the museum, gallery or private home the work inhabits. They are partly furniture and partly sculpture. At their best, they are works of art, carved by the foremost sculptors of their day, and yet their own brilliance must also serve that of the paintings they encase. As Dr Nicholas Penny, Director of the National Gallery, puts it drily in his elegant guide, A Closer Look At Frames: ‘Frames are thus not a marginal consideration in the history of art.’

And yet, anomalously, to all but certain connoisseurs and collectors, museum curators and auctioneers and the artists and dealers who depend upon them, they are practically invisible. In books of art history, in auction catalogues, the frame is expunged. In museum shops, postcards feature the artwork alone, without the frame that has been a critical part of the visitor’s experience of the work. Partly this is a necessary recognition that the artwork, especially if it is an Old Master, has most likely been separated from its original frame. Paintings have regularly been reframed by new owners, both to assert ownership and to incorporate the work within different and sometimes elaborate interior decorative schemes. But the consequence is a collective blindness to these often remarkably beautiful creations.

You are to visit a local art gallery and evaluate the frames of at least 10 the art works displayed.

• Is there a catalogue of the art work at this gallery? Is the frame expunged?
• Are there frames at all?
• Are the frames enhancing the art work? Y/N? Why? Why not?