To Frame or Not to Frame: How I Decide

A collector once sent me a photograph of a painting she had just had framed. It was a good painting. The framer had given it a wide, ornate, gilded moulding, beautifully made, obviously expensive.

The painting had disappeared. Everything you now looked at was the frame.

She knew something was wrong but could not name it, which is very common. So I want to set out the way I actually think about this, because it is a real decision with real consequences and almost nobody explains it.

First, the only rule that is not negotiable

Works on paper must be framed and glazed. Works on canvas need not be.

Paper is vulnerable to moisture, dust, insects and handling in a way canvas is not. A drawing, a watercolour, an alcohol-ink piece, a print — these need glazing, a mat or spacer so the surface never touches the glass, and acid-free materials throughout. In this climate I would add ultraviolet-filtering acrylic rather than glass, which is lighter, safer and better at protecting pigment.

That is not an aesthetic decision. It is conservation, and I do not negotiate it. My works on paper, like Obsidian Gold, always leave the studio framed this way or with clear instructions to have it done.

Everything that follows is about stretched canvas, where the decision is genuinely open.

What a frame is actually for

Strip away the decoration and a frame does three things.

It stops the painting. It gives the image a boundary so the eye rests inside it instead of running off into the wall.

It protects the edges, which is where almost all handling damage happens.

It negotiates between the painting and the room, when those two things do not naturally agree.

Notice that only one of those is about beauty. If a painting already stops itself, already has protected edges, and already sits comfortably in the room, a frame is doing nothing except taking up space and money.

When I leave a canvas unframed

When the edges are part of the painting. If I have carried the image around the sides of the stretcher, or left drips and the record of the process visible on the edge, that is information. A frame hides it. My more gestural pieces are almost always meant to be seen this way.

When the painting is contemporary and the room is quiet. A raw canvas edge in a minimal interior is a deliberate statement — direct, unmediated, no ceremony. Framing it puts a costume on something that was meant to be undressed.

When the composition already has a hard boundary. Some paintings end firmly at their own edges. Others fade or breathe outward and genuinely need something to catch them. You can usually tell by covering the edge with your hand and seeing whether anything improves.

When the canvas is deep. A stretcher of four or five centimetres has physical presence on a wall. It already casts a shadow, it already reads as an object. That is often frame enough. I stretch most of my larger work on deep bars for exactly this reason.

When I insist on a frame

When the work will hang in a formal or traditional interior. A raw canvas edge in a room with cornicing, panelled walls and antique furniture does not read as contemporary confidence. It reads as unfinished. The frame is the translator.

When the painting is going into a room full of other paintings. In a dense hang, frames do the work of separating one image from the next. Without them, a wall of unframed canvases becomes visual soup.

When the edges are messy in a way I did not intend. Honesty about my own work: not every canvas edge is a deliberate statement. Some are just staples and overspill. Those get framed.

When the collector will move house often. A framed painting survives being carried through doorways and put in vans. An unframed canvas gets thumbprints on the corners within a year.

When it is a portrait. Almost always. A portrait is a person in a room, and a frame is the window they are in. Unframed portraits tend to feel exposed in a way that works against the image.

The frames I actually recommend

The floater frame, in almost every case. The canvas sits inside the frame with a visible gap — usually eight to fifteen millimetres — all the way round, so the painting appears to hover. Nothing overlaps the painted surface, the edges are protected, and the shadow gap does the job of stopping the eye without adding decoration.

It is also the best choice for this climate, because it does not clamp the canvas on four sides and lets the edges breathe. I explain why that matters in the framing and climate guide.

Widths, roughly: two to three centimetres of face for a small work, three to five for a large one. Wider than that and the frame starts to compete.

Colour: choose from the painting, not from the furniture. This is where most people go wrong. They match the frame to the floor, the door handles, or the sofa. Then the room changes and the frame is stranded.

Take the colour from within the painting instead — usually one of the quieter tones rather than a dominant one. A warm-toned canvas often takes a natural oak or a soft off-white. A cooler painting takes a deep charcoal or a black with a little warmth in it. Raw or blackened steel works extremely well with contemporary abstracts and is more common here than people expect.

Avoid, unless there is a strong reason: heavy ornate gilded mouldings on contemporary work; anything with a strong grain pattern that competes with the surface; frames with a coloured inner lip, which almost always fights the painting; and matching the frame to the wall colour, which makes the painting float in an unresolved way.

Do not over-spend relative to the painting. A reasonable ceiling is somewhere around ten to fifteen per cent of what you paid for the work. Beyond that you are buying joinery, not presentation.

A test that costs nothing

Before committing, do this.

Print or photograph the painting. Lay strips of card in three or four candidate colours around it — a mid oak, a black, a white, a metal tone. Look at each for thirty seconds without deciding anything.

Then take the strips away and look at the bare image again.

If the painting looked better bare, you have your answer, and you have saved yourself a considerable amount of money.

What I do for collectors

I have an opinion about every painting I make, and I give it. Some works I will actively discourage you from framing, and I will say why. Others I will recommend a specific frame for, with a proportion and a tone, because I made the thing and I know what it needs.

I also work with framers here who understand canvas and understand this climate — which is a narrower group than the number of framing shops in the city would suggest.

But it is your painting and your wall. If you want a frame on something I would have left bare, that is entirely your prerogative, and I would rather you love it in a frame than tolerate it without one.

If you have a work of mine and you are undecided, send me a photograph of the wall and I will tell you what I would do. You can reach me through the enquiry page, and the collection is here if you are still choosing.