Ornate gold for Cristina Martinez

Cristina Martinez's Take Your Things and Go came through the workshop with a companion piece, Sundown. Both went on the same wall in the same room. The brief from the collector was simple. The pieces needed frames that could hold their own in a room with high ceilings and old wood.

Martinez is a Seattle-based painter who came to fine art from a background in fashion illustration. She is Black and Mexican, and her figurative work centers women of color. Take Your Things and Go was issued in 2024 as a giclée print on cold-pressed watercolor paper, edition of one hundred and fifty, signed and numbered. She sells most of her work through her own shop, June and Mars.

An ornate gold for a contemporary print

The default move with a contemporary print is something quiet. A clean black floater. A thin walnut. A frame that lets the artwork carry itself. We pushed the other way and built an ornate gilded moulding, deep profile, hand-leafed in our shop.

The reasoning is straightforward. A frame's job is to set the order in which the artwork unfolds in the room. A quiet frame on a contemporary print says the artwork is contemporary. An ornate frame says the artwork is figurative, and figurative work has a long tradition of being framed with weight. Martinez's figures carry that weight. They look out at the room rather than away from it. A frame that matches that gaze is the right argument.

Two prints, framed identically

Take Your Things and Go and Sundown were destined for the same wall. The temptation in that situation is to honor what each piece is asking for individually, and end up with two slightly different frames. We built them identically instead. The pair becomes a single statement on the wall, and the matching frames let the artworks themselves carry whatever distinction matters between the two.

Hung, both prints sit inside the same hand-leafed gold moulding, with the same hand-painted liner inside, glazed with the same museum-grade UV-filtering acrylic. From across the room they read as a couple. Up close they read as two separate compositions, each holding its own ground. That is the move with paired works. Frame the relationship, and let the art carry the distinction.