Hand-painted liner for Marcus Troy's Pieces of a Man #28

Marcus Troy's Pieces of a Man series sits in a long lineage of Black men working through fragmentation and reassembly, the way Romare Bearden did with collage and Gil Scott-Heron did with the album that gives the series its title. Pieces of a Man #28 came in to our workshop on archival paper, a layered work with deep blues and ochre, and it asked for a frame that took the title seriously. Pieces of a man means the man is being held together. The frame had to do some of that holding.

What a hand-painted liner is, and is not

A liner is a slim insert that sits between the mat and the moulding. In a stock build, a liner is a thin strip of pre-finished wood. You buy it from a catalog and you screw it in. A hand-painted liner is something else. We mix the color in our shop. We brush it onto raw linen-wrapped wood. We let it dry. We do another coat. The texture of the brushwork stays in the finish, and the color is matched to the artwork rather than picked from a chart. The cost difference is real. The visual difference is the difference between a frame that looks made and a frame that looks assembled.

For Pieces of a Man #28, we mixed the liner color in our shop to a warm umber that picked up the ochre tones in Marcus's composition without competing with the deep blues. The brushwork is visible on close inspection, a slight directional grain that catches the light and gives the liner a sense of having been touched. Around it, we built a wide quiet moulding in a cool dark walnut, deep enough to give the work weight, simple enough not to argue with the liner. The whole construction is a kind of inverted hierarchy. The custom element, the liner, sits inside. The standard element, the moulding, frames the custom element. Most of the artistry is in the part you have to step closer to see.

The case for not buying every finish off the shelf

We could have used a stock cream liner from a catalog. The piece would have looked fine. Fine is the wrong word for a Marcus Troy. Custom mixing the liner in our shop adds a day to the build. It also adds the thing collectors keep coming back for, which is the sense that the framing is part of the artwork rather than a generic step on the way to the wall.

Hung, Pieces of a Man #28 reads as a piece that was framed for itself. The liner glows in warm light. The moulding holds steady. The composition stays held together, which is what the title was asking for in the first place.