15001 Charlevoix Street
Grosse Pointe Park, MI 48230
Telephone: 313-821-8930
Fax: 313-821-8923
Aesthetic decision and functional purpose! It provides a spacer to protect paper art or photographs from direct contact with the glass. This is necessary, particularly in humid climates, to prevent the art from coming in contact with condensation or sticking to the glass and permanently damaging it. For example, if a photograph is framed in direct contact with the glass, in a few years, the silver oxide emulsion will adhere to the glass, causing unrecoverable damage to the photo. The spacing provided by the mat will prevent this while it also provides structural support for the artwork.
From an aesthetics point of view, the mats provide several design qualities that enhance your artwork. One or more mats can provide depth, width and color to your framed art. Two or more mats remove the flatness, giving your framed piece a three-dimensional look. This enhances any depth that the artist intended to create in the original work. Your artwork needs some space around it to prevent distractions from the surrounding wall treatment. Mats provide this space, allowing your art to be seen clearly. Matboards now come in hundreds of colors, textures and appearances. The choice of mat colors can be used to achieve several benefits. Carefully chosen mats can often enhance the artwork, while providing a transition to the room’s decor. Fabric mats can be used to add texture to your art. Mats covered in silk or smooth linen achieve elegance if your decor is more formal. Some of our customers change their mats when they change their decor, to maintain the coordination of their artwork. A discussion of matting options would not be complete without mentioning quality options. As recently as two decades ago, there were basically two options for matting – low quality/acidic paper mats (still referred to as “paper mats” in the industry) or 100% rag mats. Rag mats at the time only came in white. That is why one only saw artwork framed in white mats in museums and art galleries. Today, there are three main options – there are still paper mats and we still have rag mats, only now, rag mats are available in a full range of colors. The third option are archival mats, which are a blend of rag and paper, but which have been treated to remove most of the acid, lignins and other impurities. These mats are suitable for matting all but the most valuable artwork, and they come in a huge variety of colors and textures. Paper mats can be damaging to art, which is why we don't sell or recommend them. We use archival mats, and sometimes use rag mats when appropriate. You can tell whether your art is framed with paper mats or archival mats by examining the bevel cut in the mat opening. An archival mat will be a pure white without any perceptible layering. A paper mat will be off-white, and you sometimes will see the layers where the mat has been built up by lamination. The paper mats will usually turn yellow or darker after a while, due to the acidic materials used.
Selecting a frame:
The frame provides structural strength to enable you to cover your art with glass or acrylic and to hang it. But the color, style and texture of the moulding add its own ingredient to the recipe of your custom-framed art. We have a huge variety of mouldings available(over 3000), but your choice should coordinate with the art, the mats, and the particular effect you desire to achieve. For example, a bamboo-like moulding is great for oriental work, or a “Navajo” inlay works well for southwestern art. Mouldings made from natural woods and finishes are often used to coordinate with similar wood furnishings and to provide a “simple elegance” to the art. Mouldings can be used in combination to build a truly unique frame that will add additional width and color to your custom-framed art. A fillet, a narrow moulding inlaid inside the mat, coordinated with the frame moulding can be used to provide an inspired multi-dimensional look to your art. The possibilities are nearly endless, but we can help you choose the best combination for your very own presentation.The frame must be cut and assembled carefully to ensure tight corners and structural strength. Frames with bold, deeply embossed designs cannot always be cut so that the patterns match together at the corners. This is so because there is no industry-wide mathematical correlation between design spacing and even standard frame dimensions, much less the infinite sizes available in custom framing. In these cases, it is sometimes necessary to fill the patterns at the corner seams and blend the colors so the mismatch is not noticeable.