The Art of Framing

The Framing of Art

I love choosing the hue, texture and width of mattes. And whether to use a double or single and what kind of frame best displays the art. Simple, wooden, metal, ornate… But I’m not talking about literal framing.

I’m talking about creating frames around the tapestry of our life.

We are each the artist of our life. Every day we decide how we want to mold it, shape it, revise it, chisel away at it, reinvent it… the tools of creation are endless.

Our life IS our art.

But it moves so fast. Like weather patterns across the sky. Even cloudless, the blues morph. And so do we.

However, it seems without an occasional pause, without capturing a few still frames as it all passes by, we miss the opportunity to process the layers of foreground and background and how even they shift depending on perspective.

This beautiful illustration by Monica Ramos depicts so elegantly that what we frame out in the tapestry of our day or life gives it prominence. Where we choose to focus seems to richen with detail. Open up with meaning, symbolism and possibility.

AND, if we pause for long enough, we see the still life is not still at all.

The movement just shifts from a two-dimensional observation to a three or four dimensional participation. A kind of interactive travel into the complex dimensionality of experience.

And although the particular moment we choose to frame does deepen in detail, the moment itself is less important than the time we are willing to spend looking at it.

We look until we begin to see.

And we see until the art of our life begins to develop like a photograph– showing us things we couldn’t have imagined, things we had no idea were even there.

EVEN THOUGH it is a moment from OUR life!

It is like by framing a chosen moment, we create a window out of it, which we can then open and reach through.

There are so many layers of perception that elude us.

So many. I keep signing up for new adventures and inner excavational journeys to find and see and feel the unchartered worlds inside the tapestry of my life.

There are beautiful dark continents awaiting the spotlight of our attention.