This weekend at Farpoint, I bought my first piece of artwork from the Art Auction. To be honest, it was the first time I bid on anything in the Art Auction at any convention. Usually I’ll go and take a look, see something that looks nice, but never anything I felt like I simply couldn’t do without.
Then I saw this Lord of the Rings piece, “The Study,” by John Kaufmann. And I wanted it.
There were no bids on it. The minimum bid price was twenty-five dollars. The “buy it now” price was forty. I felt like twenty-five was too little for this piece of art, but I didn’t want to go to forty, so I thought thirty was a good price to pay.
A few hours later, I came back to the Art Auction, just to make sure that no one else had bid on the piece. And someone had! B43 or somesuch, whoever you are! And B43 had bid forty dollars!
Well, this simply wouldn’t do. So, I placed another bid, taking the price to forty-five (and, if you note, over the initial “buy it now” price which I hadn’t wanted to go to) and forcing the piece to go to an actual auction on Sunday morning.
At 10 o’clock Sunday morning, I was at the auction, but B43 was not. I had “The Study,” for forty-five dollars.
Then, I needed a frame for it. The piece came matted, so all I needed was an appropriate frame. I went to Michael’s after work two nights ago and studied the 16″ x 20″ frames. It seemed to me that the simplest way to frame it was to get a frame with a matte already in it, dispose of the matte, and simply drop my art (with matte) in.
I located a frame that I thought would work with the dark blue matte (Michael’s called it “Montreal,” I think), took it home, and made a horrible discovery.
The matte came out easily. That wasn’t the problem. The artwork I had went in the frame easily. That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that the artwork and its backing was so thick that the back of the frame wouldn’t go on easily. The clasps wouldn’t slide back into place because they didn’t line up with the grooves.
Thus, I spent half an hour with a screwdriver and a hammer, gently hammering these clasps into the frame. Basically, the artwork is never going to come out of the frame.
Then I had to hang it. That I did last night.
It’s one of those dual hook frames. Whoever designed a dual hook frame, with hooks that flop around and fall over, was a diabolical mind to rival that of Torquemada. Getting it on the wall took twenty minutes, the picture isn’t level, and just when I thought had it up the first time, I went to wipe down the fingerprints I’d managed to smudge on the glass while putting it up and ended up knocking it off the nails.
That said, the picture is on the wall, it looks fantastic, and “The Study” is easily the best sixty dollars (picture and frame) that I’ve spent at a convention.