For Oxford American, Wendy Brenner recounts the joys of working as an art-framer, sharing her process and tales of a boss who’s more than a little off-the-wall. As she considers the satisfaction she gets in preserving timeless treasures for clients, she reflects on her mother’s decline and how humans and memory defy preservation.
The assignments on the worktable each morning have been set aside for me because they’re easy and I’m a novice, or because they’re complicated and there’s a skill I need to learn, or practice. Or because my boss knows I will love them—though maybe I’m imagining that.
Once, early on, I drilled a screw into the back of a frame and it came out through the front, a bad mistake. The frame had to be rebuilt. I arrived at work the next day to find twenty identical manufactured frames from Target or Walmart, allegedly brought in by a customer who wanted only new hangers installed on the backs. A strange order. I spent the day drilling forty holes, installing forty screws, twisting forty wires. My hands hurt for a week.
I work six or seven hours without breaks. I can’t seem to explain this to my friends. Momentum, focus. While I’m cleaning glass, inspecting endlessly for specks of dust or lint, using a marker to cover a flea-sized chip on a frame, time falls away. Everything outside the moment falls away, like a blurred background in an Impressionist landscape. No, I don’t want lunch, no I don’t want to sit down.
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