An archive of the Bark Newsletter, Blog, and Press
Posted on February 2nd, 2017
Bark Frameworks is now entirely owned by its employees through an ESOP trust. For the past two years we have been discussing the prospect of creating an ESOP—an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, and now we have taken this big step.
I will continue working at the company on a number of projects and will chair the board of directors. Karl Thorndike, who has served a... Read More
Posted on June 4th, 2015
This article is currently posted on our "Framing Projects" page -- click here for the complete article and slideshow. Read More
Posted on October 7th, 2014
Framing for "Danseuse Buste, 1897"
Edgar Degas, "Danseuse Buste, 1897," unframed.To frame the Degas pastel we discussed in our last Newsletter, we made a profile that was closely related to three drawings from his sketchbooks. As we noted, a few original Degas frames of this genre still can be seen. But there are no surviving examples of frames made from most of his drawings, and it i... Read More
Posted on September 5th, 2014
A recent Bark Frameworks job that involved framing three Degas pastels. This is Part I of a two-part article. Part II will appear in the October 2014 Newsletter.
Edgar Degas was an inventive designer of frames. In several of his notebooks from 1879-1884 appear some forty frame profile drawings of striking originality. But only a few of the artist’s frame designs appear to have migrated from the notebooks to the frame shop. And since dealers and collectors were ... Read More
Posted on September 3rd, 2014
Frames carry multiple messages. Around a work of art a frame can establish an emphatic border—the artwork is inside the frame/the world is outside; or it may act as an almost invisible bridge from the artwork to the wall and the room. The frame may have more to do with the décor surrounding it than the work of art within it; or a frame may serve as an ornate halo, bestowing honor or status on the work framed.
Frames appear in many forms in the media, especially in a... Read More
Posted on August 6th, 2014
To read the full article, click here.
Bark Frameworks Newsletter, No. 4 - August 2014.
... Read More
Posted on August 6th, 2014
The exhibition “The Renoir Returns” opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art several weeks ago. The centerpiece of the exhibition, the artist’s “On the Shore of the Seine” (c. 1879), is a small landscape that was stolen from the museum more than 60 years ago. The painting was restored to the BMA by a federal judge after a woman, who claimed to have bought it at a flea market because she liked the frame, tried... Read More
Posted on June 27th, 2014
Bark worked closely with the Rothko estate and Pace Gallery to design frames for Mark Rothko’s early works on paper, which incorporated watercolor, ink, graphite and charcoal. Click here fo... Read More
Posted on June 27th, 2014
In Adolf Loos’s 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime,” he wrote that “the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use.” We’ve borrowed Loos’s pungent title even though culture has evolved—to twist and circle, like the guilloche—in ways Loos never imagined. Ornament occupies a secure, if minor, place in contemporary frame design. For us, it’s most interesting when the ornamental element is the focus of the frame, not ... Read More
Posted on May 29th, 2014
One of the most compelling aspects of designing frames at Bark is that our designers get to work with living artists—both established and emerging—to design frames that present their work in the best possible way, as well as protect it from an environment that can be harsh for art materials.
And we can share with artists our deep experience in designing frames that present an artist’s work in the best light. The first question for our designers in working... Read More