big frames, tiny pictures
The other day, I did a short "gallery tour" through Harajuku and visited the Design Festa Gallery for the first time. As it says right on the tin, the gallery is associated with the Design Festa event held bi-annually at Tokyo Big Sight (I went there for the first time last November). It's an old-apartment-building-turned-gallery - on one of the floors, the old kitchen of one of the former apartments was still there (just not functional anymore, I assume).
The gallery does rotating exhibitions of various artists, regardless of whether or not they have attended Design Festa before ... and not just paintings either, but also crochet art, fashion, and all sorts of stuff.
One of the exhibitions was titled "Anone", from Oka Yuuri (Instagram link). This artist does "cute girls only" anime art, a style that I'm not super into anymore, but with some nice technique and stylistic choices (for example, I like how some of the pieces contrast very carefully-drawn portraits with thick blotches of colour). However, one of the pieces stood out to me:
What drew my attention here was the frame, and what kind of effect it creates. I've actually seen this "big frame, tiny picture" combination before: There are one or two framed pictures like this at my parent's place. I don't know who made them, but they've been there for a long time. And I remember being strangely intrigued by them, too.
Because I kept thinking about this picture and its framing, I did some cursory research. And as it turns out, there's some technique to all kinds of framing. What kind of picture frame you use partly determines how the picture placed inside is perceived. This seems obvious, but I hadn't thought about all that much until now. Nowadays, aside from the really old, elaborate frames you tend to only see on old old paintings in museums, most frames you see are of the minimalistic kind and don't draw attention to themselves.
These really big frames, combined with tiny pictures, work differently: First, the chunky frame, contrasted with the tiny picture inside of it, draws your attention ("what is this?"). Essentially, they compensate for the tininess of the picture, signifying "hey, here's a piece of art you can look at!" Then, once it's drawn your attention, it turns your focus inward, towards the painting. It creates a thick "wall" between the painting and the world around it, removing the distractions. Of course, colour plays a role as well. For example, the blue and silver used in the frame for the picture above matches the cool colors of the drawing and reinforces its serene kind of mood.
In museums, this kind of "isolating effect" is usually achieved by leaving a lot of white space around a piece of art, using the space to enable the visitor to focus. In a way, the big-frame-tiny-picture combo is a way to replicate this effect without having to rent out a huge gallery space. To me, it also has an almost meditative effect. By leaving you with "nothing else to look at" than the tiny picture, it encourages you to look deeper, ask questions and search for meaning, even if the motif itself doesn't seem that interesting at first glance. This is a stylistic device that I want to try out / experiment with myself.