My mother-in-law is a trained oil painter. She specializes in Oceanside scenes, Mountain View scenes and old east Texas barns. Her work is wonderful and she puts many hours into her work. When I asked her why she did not display her work at the Forth Worth arts fair, her answer was I could never afford the wood picture frames. They would cost me more than the art would sell for.
It is true that quality wood picture frames cost more than the artist pictures place in them. This may be one reason the art shows have been such a poor quality of late. One way of keeping the cost of the frame down is to attend garage sales where people have beautiful pictures for sale for pennies on the dollar. Often time you can pick up a 10×12 picture frame that would retail for $150.0 for $5.00.
This is a sad commentary about the state of the picture frame industry. You can have a wood picture frame carved by lasers for just a few pennies. New air hammers and staplers nail the wood frames together in less than two minutes. The staining of the wood frames takes an hour to finish. The total cost of production is less than $3.00. The wood frames are marked up as much as 500%.
It is a shame that the wood frame costs more than the painting. Especially when the wood frame only takes a few hours to make compared to the hours that an artist puts into her/his work. Maybe someday the honest wood frame maker will come out in the open and ask for a true price for his artistry than the overinflated prices you get at the local frame shops.
It is funny that the artist is often dead before their work is truly discovered. The frame-maker will be paid but forgotten in the long run. Today it is cheaper for the artist to go to Wal-Mart or Target and purchase a picture for $19.00 so that they can use the frame for their work.
Wood picture frames with the proper matting adds great value to the artists work that is displayed. I find myself often admiring the wooden picture frame more than I do the work it is designed to highlight. In many cases I must agree that the wooden picture frame is more the work of an artist than the painting that the frame encloses. So maybe in the end , it is the wooden picture frame that makes the picture valuable.
