Closed Mondays for private appointments only. Call for details...
(Note: This is a story about recognizing and accepting that the need for artistic expression can be so compelling that any amount of suppression will only make it harder and harder to ignore. Like love, you need to be ALL IN before you can truly experience the feeling. I fought it for as long as I could; but in the end, I had to acknowledge those who inspired and motivated me along the way.)
As art show requests and sales inquiries started to increase, so did my need for framing and reproductions. Lucky for me, I found an amazing little shop only three and a half bike miles away. Walking into Museum Quality Framing was like walking into a place where you’d want to hang out all day, drink coffee, see what customers brought in, eavesdrop on conversations, and generally distract the staff with your incessant questions and commentary. Instead of shooing me out with the rest of the riffraff, the owner, Jim Brent, let me hang out and even invited me to go behind the scenes and see his workshop which was on the other side of a swinging door just off of the main showroom of displayed art and countless frame samples. I felt pretty special seeing ‘where the magic happened’ because Jim had everything you would possibly need to reproduce anything and frame it. This was a world that was very foreign to me and Jim seemed more like a cross between the Mad Hatter and The Great and Powerful Oz than a store owner. When Jim wasn’t sitting behind two giant computer screens, he was tending to an oversized ink jet printer like a diligent drone scurrying around an impatient queen bee or firing up the incredibly loud frame-making machine that seemed everywhere at once. It didn’t take long for me to realize that Jim was freaking brilliant, and all
I wanted to do was learn from him.
A friendship ensued and I found myself being exposed to new media, new ideas and new business. Soon, I was a regular at the shop and business was rolling along for the both of us. Besides me, Jim worked with many artists, some local, some far away – some famous, some not so famous. It didn’t take long for me to figure out why Jim was so popular. It turns out that the relationship between an artist and the person who reproduces their work is not only critically important – it will literally determine if you’re miserable or on top of the world that day. I can relate to this because there’s nothing more frustrating for an artist than to see that the colors DON’T MATCH between the reproduction and the original. Apparently, getting ink jet colors to match original pigment color or computer graphics (color by light) is an art form in and of itself – and Jim was a guru. When I think back on those five years I spent at Museum Quality Framing, I see Jim as Sam, the bartender from the television show Cheers and me as Norm, the beer-swilling regular who made the bar his ‘home away from home.’ But when I close my eyes and visualize what Jim taught me, Jim’s shoulder always obliterates about a third of the mental picture. That’s because I must’ve logged at least three thousand hours peering over it as he printed, framed, and performed what looked to be sorcery with Adobe’s Photoshop on his ginormous Macintosh.
I had never really understood what computer graphics were all about until I watched Jim do things in seconds that would take me hours and hours to do by hand. I was mesmerized by the possibilities and felt like I had just stumbled upon the greatest secret that had been kept from me my entire life. The lightbulb went on again, and suddenly I knew I needed my own Apple computer. Jim and I used to joke that we had that enviable relationship immortalized by roles played by Tom Cruise and Cuba Gooding Jr. in the sports agent movie, Jerry Maguire. We even went as far as imagining other artists complaining to their art reproduction guys by saying, “Dude, why don’t we have that kind of relationship?” So, it’s probably not hard to fathom that Jim accompanied me to the Apple Store to make sure I bought the right computer.
And just like that, my upstairs spare bedroom started looking less like Grandma’s craft room and more like a computer graphics lab. Gone were the cumbersome easels, messy paints, and jars of brushes and pens. In their place, I had my new computer, a drawing tablet, a stylus, a ‘Photoshop for Dummies’ book (not kidding) and umm . . . that’s it!
Museum Quality Framing & Art Services
60 Palm Drive, Camarillo, California 93010, United States
Copyright © 2024 Museum Quality Framing & Art Services - All Rights Reserved.
Powered by GoDaddy
We use cookies to analyze website traffic and optimize your website experience. By accepting our use of cookies, your data will be aggregated with all other user data.