Purple Print - Matting and framing - Style opinion

[Deval]

Hello, I've got a style/opinion question. My wife and I have been debating(and of course she is right) about matting/framing options for a 30x40 fujiflex print that I made from a recent trip to yosemite. She has a much better sense of style than I do, so no arguments of what will end up on our wall, but ---if I were to present this in a gallery, or perhaps sell the print, I'd like your opinion.

Here is the picture in question. color straight from the velvia 100 slide itself:
Glacier Point Sunset by DevalJoshi, on Flickr

I recently printed another 30x40 of a river and trees, and it was pretty easy to pick the colors...We spent some time at a framers and couldn't come to an easy conclusion...the purples really threw the choices off.

What color mat and style frame would you choose for this print?

[Jim Cole]

Personally, I'm a fan of double white mat and black 2" wood frames with no color at all. This way the photo speaks for itself. If you triple mat, you could put a 1/4" reveal purple mat between the two white mats. This way the purple doesn't need to be a perfect match and it will still add a little zip.

[Deval]

I like the triple mat idea...

Personally, I'm a fan of double white mat and black 2" wood frames with no color at all. This way the photo speaks for itself. If you triple mat, you could put a 1/4" reveal purple mat between the two white mats. This way the purple doesn't need to be a perfect match and it will still add a little zip.

[Michael Gordon]

How about NO overmat? I personally think that beyond 30" or so, a conventionally overmatted/framed piece looks strange. Another option to consider is an acrylic facemount, either floated in a frame or not. Float-framed ends up looking something like this. I like to work with Finishing Concepts in Los Angeles for my facemounts and framing. Good luck.

[Deval]

I have seen acrylic facemounts and like the contemporary style they offer. I've heard they don't come out as well if not immediately done after printing(due to imperfections on the surface of the print.

We ended up going for a triple mat(white with a dark blue in the middle) which looks really nice and a stone brown-grayish frame to accent to the stone of half dome. Gray apparently goes very well with purple. I'll take a picture in a couple of weeks after it is on our wall

[alavergh]

I'm not very good at this stuff, but I'll give it a shot with what I might attempt.

Plain black frame, thick or thin. Use a double mat, but the bottom one would be a pink tone similar to the sky along the left side with a white mat over top of that.

[paulr]

I'm not a fan of facemounting. It can look great, especially if you're going for a modern/minimalist feel. But it's expensive, there's a high failure rate, and the finished piece is fragile and almost impossible to repair. If it's big, you'll be signing up for professional art movers.

I like shadow box frames for big pieces. Mount them with a bit of white border, and use a frame that allows a spacer to elevate the glazing off the print. It's clean, more traditional than face mounting but less stuffy than overmatting. It keeps the final frame size much smaller than overmatted prints. And it offers all the protections of conventional framing.

[andrew gardiner]

I like shadow box frames for big pieces. Mount them with a bit of white border, and use a frame that allows a spacer to elevate the glazing off the print. It's clean, more traditional than face mounting but less stuffy than overmatting. It keeps the final frame size much smaller than overmatted prints. And it offers all the protections of conventional framing.

I'm completely with you on that paulr. A shadow box is clean and modern and the white border is a photographic convention that it's nice to show anyway. It displays the actual material a photograph is printed on and, if it has been wet printed, indicates of course the space created by the easel and so is a reminder of process.
As to the frame itself, shadow box choices are satisfyingly limited really only to width and depth. The chunkier ones are of course stronger (if you're mounting something really big) but the payoff is that they are less elegant and so I typically prefer a slim 1/2 inch or so wide and maybe 1 3/4 inches deep for something roughly 20x24.
For your magenta hued photograph I would go for a dark stained walnut or if you're really pushing the boat out a dark stained rosewood would be lovely (the spacers inside should always just be white). I don't think any attempt to match or compliment the purple in a colour will work and black is probably fine but might be slightly too dominant.

[mathieu Bauwens]

I would go for a completely white frame so that only the purple hue could be seen on the wall.

[dodphotography]

eghhh... a color matte? No way man.