He's Been Framed

At nursery and pre-school DC is quite the little artist. At home he prefers to wield the scissors and make small piles of squares out of what once would have been the M&S Home catalogue, or somesuch; he leaves them all over the floor, of course.

Those of you who are parents, grandparents or similar, will know what it's like to find curling bits of cellophane, tatty pieces of paper, fluffy/felty/woolly/scrappy bits of who knows what thrust into your hands by your little darling(s). Some of the said 'art work' isn't that bad, while some is destined for the recycling bin just as soon as the small child is occupied enough with the tv/iPad/box of matches that they won't notice what you are doing.

So, what of the stuff that you keep hold of? Well, if you're anything like us, some of it gets stuck to the fridge-freezer and then rotated into a drawer when new 'worth-keeping' (in Mummy's opinion) artwork comes home. And then one day you're searching for something completely different and come upon an enormous pile of 'art' stuffed in the drawer and you think 'I really should do something with that' (and by 'something' I don't mean start a fire or put it through the shredder.)

So, when the planets are aligned and you find a large pile of artwork plus an old frame that needs either using or binning plus a tester pot of paint - this is what happens:
When my Mum moved, this VERY faded print of the Clifton Suspension bridge in Bristol came down off the wall in her old house and didn't go back up in her new house. She asked me to take it to the charity shop, but I decided I could use the frame, so I kept it (sorry charity shop.)

I don't know if you can see from the photos very clearly, but it's a dark wood frame with a hint of 'gold' running round the inside edge.

The frame had been well put together and it took a bit of effort for me to prise the nails/staples out.

But eventually I got the back off.

And bade farewell to the print.

As luck would have it, a new tester pot of paint had recently come into the house. A very dark charcoal grey by Dulux known as Bowler Hat. Although the colour wasn't right for the wall(s) that I had in mind, I thought it would make a great colour for a picture frame. And so I set to with my paintbrush (and I'm so lazy that I didn't even bother to sand down the frame [let alone use primer] before applying two coats of paint.)

My first thought was to put this piece of fingerprint art in the frame, but the white paper against the cream border didn't really work (plus the picture was slightly too small for the border.)

A little shuffle through the rest of the art in the drawer and this little beauty was declared to be perfect.

I even 'signed' it on behalf of the artist; handily, one of the nursery teachers had even written the date on the picture, so I added that too.

And then I wondered if I might perhaps prefer to hang the picture this way, which is a bummer now I've written DC's name on the other edge.

Oh, and in another furtuitous turn of events, the day after I'd taken the frame apart and started painting it, DC knocked anoher picture frame over and it broke. The fixings/hangings on the back were perfect for fixing/hanging our new frame, so I whipped the screwdriver out,

took them off the old frame

and attached them to the 'new' one.

It looks like a right old dog's dinner from behind, but who's going to see it?

You can expect to see a retrospective of DC's work, entitled The Early Years, at the Tate Modern very soon.