Working with Scott is great. He has a wonderful eye, and is also cognizant of how to save you money. I have gone back over and over. For example, I showed up with about 18 little animal prints I'd bought from the Friends of the Library. I wanted to get them framed to donate to the Humane Society of the San Bernardino Valley for a silent auction.
Scott looked at all of them and told me that standard frames I could buy inexpensively at a thrift store or at Michael's would work, and would be less expensive than paying him to make frames. Once I had the frames, which he suggested should just be black, he matted them all with black matting, which, as he explained, would put the emphasis on the image being framed. It really worked! They all looked great!
I also had some old oil paintings that were grimy and a bit damaged. Scott had the business card for Ninya Lee Greek, who does appraisals, restoration and repairs. She met me at Scott's shop, which was very handy, so I didn't have to drive to Kearney Mesa. She took them to her own store to restore them, then brought them back to Scott's in Oceanside to be re-framed, after she had repaired and cleaned the three oil paintings. The oil paintings, which were almost 100 years old, looked AMAZINGLY better! Definitely worth the price to have them professionally cleaned and repaired!
Scott and Ninya both thought the frames on the two smaller oils detracted from them. They were correct! When Scott selected new frames with a reddish tone, they made the little oil paintings pop! I already liked them, but now I love them!
The large oil, by a relatively well-known artist, had been framed, but the frame had disappeared while the painting was at another framer's to be cleaned. That framing business belatedly decided they couldn't clean the painting depite having held onto it for a long time (!). As for the frame, that company is supposedly still looking for it - their storage area of frames was a mess ( unlike Scott's shop, which is neat and tidy but full of cool paintings) and so I agreed to let them keep looking.
In the meantime, I asked Scott to help me pick out a comparable frame that was similar to the original and missing frame. (We had a photo of it to work from.) Sure enough, Scott picked out a perfect replacement, with lines and curves that mirrored the clouds in the painting.
As I said, I have been coming back to The Frame House a lot. Another piece I brought to Scott, which Ninya also appraised, had been framed by my dad in the days before acid-free materials. Luckily, Scott removed it from its non-acid-free backing before any damage was done, and also suggested a new mat color: black.
Wow! The black mat, once again, made the painting look a thousand times better than the original white matting! It was amazing that just changing the matting color could make it so much more appealing. I was so thrilled that I bought another painting with a white matting, and brought it in immediately to be re-matted, knowing that the image I had admired would be even more striking with a new, darker mat. This time Scott showed me how a very dark blue, rather than a b;lack mat, would work even better.
I really wish I had taken before and after photos of how these items looked before being so greatly improved by Scott's keen eye and Ninya's cleaning. But try and imagine what they looked like before -- not half as nice as now. I am going to see if I can at least post the before photos. read more