Cuba Street Art

A client recently brought these 3 pieces of Cuban street art to be framed.

His girlfriend had bought them years ago, he knew she loved them so thought they would make a great Christmas present. We discussed various framing options, the first being to window mount them. I was of the opinion that it would spoil the feel of the pieces, roughly cut canvas and cotton material (in the case of the portrait). My client agreed!

Therse's a certain charm in being able to see the whole of an art work, with these you can see pencil marks to outline the border of the picture, the frayed edges, loose threds and even, in the portrait, staple holes where it was once seemingly attached to a wooden stretcher.

So we decided they should be float mounted. Float mounting is great for this sort of art and gives the impression of the piece hovering in the frame rather than peaking through a window mount. It also works brilliantly for artworks which go right out to the edge and pieces where the paper that is rough cut or has nice textured edge.

​The two street scenes were pretty straight forward as they were fairly rigid due to the thickness of the paint. They were floated on acid free mountboard using linen hinging tape and then attached to some acid free foam core board to lift them away from the background.

The portrait was slightly trickier because it was much thinner and wouldn't sit flat properly as it had been streched earlier in it's life when it was on a wooden stretcher. If I floated it in the same style as the others I would be able to see the hinging tape from the front and it would flop about. Not ideal! So I used very thin hinging tissue which virtually disappears and flush floated it so it sat flat on the backing mountboard. It was hard to know whether it would look right when the floating process was complete because, obviously, it has to be done with the artwork facing down due to the many kinks and lumps that were in the fabric! Thankfully it looked fine when I turned it over.

Because of the very colourful nature of these works we decided to frame them with a simple, deep rebated, white frame, it's often nice to pick out a colour from a piece of art and tie the framing to it with either the mountboard or the frame moulding, but there's far too much colour and too much going on to do anything but simple with these.

Below you can see the finished frames and I hope you agree that they work very well. They were certainly a great joy to work on!