My mother passed a couple of years ago, and we are clearing out her things so Dad can move.
One piece I am reluctant to toss is a painting mom did of my niece as a baby. It is huge, probably 30x40 or larger. Shipping it to my brother's family is prohibitive, and they do not want to hang it as-is.
I am crafty and would like to take the canvas apart and make a keepsake from it for my niece. Her birthday is next month, she will be 9. Any suggestions? So far I have thought of a smaller framed piece as a close-up, or possibly a tote bag (it is a beach scene). But I think there might be a more nifty keen option out there.
Thank you.
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Posted 1 year ago #
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You could snap a photo of it, frame it and send it that way. Or you could have the photo enlarged to poster size- roll it up and send it in a tube. sounds lime a fun project, your niece is lucky to have you giving it some thought.
Posted 1 year ago # -
As an art lover, I hate for the painting to be destroyed and I would think your niece would love to have it one day when she's older.
So my suggestion is.... remove it from the frame and roll the canvas up, put it in a tube mailer 30" long (from any office supply store) and mail it to her to keep.
A photo just doesn't cut it over an original painting by your grandmother.
Posted 1 year ago # -
i would either take a (professional) picture or leave it like it is. if you roll it you can easily destroy it.
Posted 1 year ago # -
I looked up rolling up an acrylic painting....
A painting ought to survive being rolled up and posted, provided you ensure the paint is completely dry and don't roll it up too tightly. But realize that it does have risks associated with it, starting with the potential for damaging the painting when you take the canvas off its stretchers and when someone re-stretches it. As for storing painting rolled up, it's not an ideal long-term choice, so perhaps limit it to your 'B' grade paintings if you don't foresee having additional space at any stage.
It was just a suggestion to save the painting as is. There is no right or wrong....it just seems a shame to cut it down or discard it. My thought is the niece will value it when she's older.
Posted 1 year ago # -
yes rolling paintings is risky, as is removing them from the stretcher in any way (I'm sorry but the tote bag idea really freaks me out!)
Along the back wall of a closet is usually where I put large pictures that aren't displayed. They can also slide in behind a desk or bookshelf. Or hang it on the wall in your home somewhere.
Take a good quality photo to send to your niece.
Cropping down might seem like a good idea to you, but trust me, as an artist, it's a massive insult. I once had someone crop one of my paintings - a portrait, and they cut out the background to make the framing cheaper - and to this day I can't look at that piece without feeling angry. The background was an integral part of my design.
Posted 12 months ago # -
Acrylic paintings are very forgiving and can withstand the rolling process much better than a graphite or oil piece. Place a piece of acid-free cloth or tissue paper on top of the piece before rolling...this will keep the painting from damaging itself. After you send it to your niece it can be (gently) re-stretched onto stretcher bars or re-mounted on to an acid-free, gesso-coated artists masonite board if desired.
I agree, don't crop the piece...that would be too sad :(
There is another option...you can take a photo of the piece and have it copied/printed on a piece of smaller canvas that is made for just this sort of process using your own printer....here is a link to the product I am talking about. This way you keep the integrity of the work, but on a smaller scale.
http://www.fredrixprintcanvas.com/PrintCanvas/ProductCategory.aspx?path=004001002
Posted 12 months ago # -
I agree with everyone who said that cropping the piece would be a mistake. I'd also say that this is one instance where a photo does not make an adequate replacement.
I think you'd be doing your niece a disservice by interfering with the painting to an extent beyond careful removal of the existing frame and rolling (only for shipping). This includes getting rid of the painting altogether. When you have a painting representing you, you want to have it. If it was made by someone close to you like a relative that goes double. If the relative has passed away, triple.
Now that the artist (your mom) is no longer around, I think there is only one person who is allowed to mess with the painting: the subject, who is also in this case the painting's most likely intended recipient, that is, your niece. But at 9, she is too young to have what it takes for such a decision, so the adults need to preserve it for her until she is old enough. That should be her own parents, ideally, but if they can't or won't, then I think you should keep it. I certainly don't think the child should be deprived of the opportunity to make her own decision about such an extra-ordinary keepsake just because her aunt and/or parents got a little too trigger-happy with their decluttering.
Otherwise, y'all better start preparing a justification for why you tossed something like that and kept anything else, because I can guarantee she will want to know later. And it should be a good one, because it won't be easy to justify keeping ANYTHING else if you've tossed/destroyed this, as this type of thing is the last you should be getting rid of.
You have plenty of Stuff to get rid of or 'repurpose' (what a heinous word used in this context) before you get to this one, including OTHER paintings your mom may have made that are of more indifferent things, like random landscapes or still natures. There are *loads* of great suggestions for alternatives in this thread, and I expect there will be more after my post; use one of them, and let go of the ridiculous notion of cutting up original art work like it's nothing more than a picture from a magazine.
As for a birthday present - for a 9 year old, there are better options out there than a totebag.
Posted 12 months ago # -
Then again, the 9 year may grow into an adult who hates the painting carefully kept for her for many years or shipped around at great expense :) She may not want the burden, particularly if she didn't know the artist that well... I think this is a judgement for Ellen to make on a pragmatic basis rather than to have judgements made when all the facts aren't known. Different generations can have different values: my grandma has spent the last 20 years telling all her relatives she will leave them her silver in her will, and every one of them is saying 'why would I want a load of horrible silver to clean?'! This is obviously a more personal item with potentially more sentimental value, but minimising the cost and storage area as well as protecting it in case the niece may want it is clearly a trade-off.
Posted 12 months ago # -
Exactly lottie - but then SHE will make the decision. You can always toss something you don't want at a later date; you can't retrieve it when it's been destroyed or given away. I've been there, and it wasn't even someone else tossing stuff FOR me - it was me getting rid of MY OWN stuff during a massive declutter, then regretting it after. I'd wager that's happened to anyone who isn't a total noob at uncluttering; if it hasn't, they've either only decluttered as mature adults or they're lying. I've been decluttering since childhood, so it has happened, more than once too.
So yeah, she ABSOLUTELY might hate it. Then, she will be free to have some firestartin' fun in the backyard with it. But it will be HER decision, made BY herself FOR herself, in accordance with her own ADULT values. Not something she has to accept because when the decision was made, she was just a kid who didn't know better and wasn't even asked anyway.
Plus, even though this is a fairly large painting as paintings go, it is not in the general scheme of things a large item - especially frameless (you can store it flat inside a large document holder; that's how my mother stores her few larger pieces). It's not like this is a handmade cot that someone built for her, which is too small for her past a certain age but is too big to store as is and can't be reused without extensive alterations. A painting is still a portable item. Put it this way: keeping the painting until the kid is old enough to decide isn't gonna get in the way of anybody leaving a good life. At the same time, not having it could deprive a kid of the link with a grandma she didn't get to know as well as she'd have liked.
Posted 12 months ago # -
Shall I just post a warning here for the artists who want the piece saved, untouched for the next decade? Cause I was thinking redoing it into a scrapbook cover.... Although rolling and shipping is isn't bad either - I think it would be worth the risk, if the cost of shipping it in one piece is too much to handle. Have you weighed it and figured out how much it would really cost?
I have ask, if the girl's parents don't want it to hang, how well could your mom paint? Not to be rude, but seriously, is anyone ever going to want to hang this up and look at it? My BIL's grandmother paints, mostly horrible, flat landscapes and clown portraits. You'd have to be hoarder-level sentimental to ever want to display one of them on a wall, especially at that size.
I'm not doing so well with the idea that the girl needs to make her own decision as an adult either. She's 8. If she realizes in a decade or two that you didn't perfectly preserve one single keepsake from her gram that she might, perhaps, maybe have wanted, well...tough. I wish I had my grandfather's electric guitar and his 1940's Harley gear too, but that isn't what happened. The adults in my family made a choice about what to keep, and that's how it goes.
Posted 12 months ago # -
jbeany, you speak just like someone who wasn't allowed to make their own decisions, and suffered from it - aaaall of the bitterness and hostility that I associate with this kind of experience.
Your post is seriously a good illustration of what I think may be easily avoided by the (fairly small) effort involved in keeping this painting intact. Artistic value hasn't got much to do with it; documentary value does. This is a piece of family history, and a connection with her grandma that is all the more important since said grandma is dead and since this is something the gran created, not merely an item she picked out at a store to use or even a meaningless bit of crap she crafted.
I have experience with getting rid of dead people's things: everyone but my mom and one grandmother (who is a truly horrible person, so I won't be doing much for her stuff) died before I was 11. I have come to conclude that there is a hierarchy for what to keep vs toss (whether that's donate or sell or trash, doesn't matter). In that hierarchy, this painting is at the top right along with letters and diaries: portable, stashable items that offer loads of 'payoff' in terms of clues to the person's personality and experiences, as well as for family history.
Think of it like the uncluttering equivalent to the consumer issues concept of 'value for money': these things offer a lot of information value for little relative currency (space). Bear in mind that it's quite likely there weren't many letters or diaries, because not everyone is a prolific writer like that; in my family they were, but OP's mom may have used her artwork in the same way.
Posted 12 months ago # -
beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
does the your niece like the painting, do you like the painting?
does she want it saved for her? do you want to save it?
answer those questions for yourself and go from there.
any of your or these ideas are great.Posted 12 months ago # -
If this were my family I would allow the parents of the painting's subject -- your brother and his spouse -- make the decision. They apparently do not like it well enough to want it hanging in their house or to pay for shipping. It is their responsibility to make decisions on behalf their daughter at this stage in her life. Ask them if they would like to have it cut down and re-purposed into something else, destroyed, given away or shipped to them at their expense. In any case, it is not your responsibility to hold onto it for the next 10 years until your niece is of an age to make the decision for herself :)
Posted 12 months ago # -
If I had been given at age 21 a painting of me as a baby done by my grandmother which had been saved by my aunt or parents for 10+ years, I would feel love and care to last and take me through a lifetime.
Posted 12 months ago # -
No, mili, I'm not bitter at all. (Perhaps you are projecting?)
I really do think it's completely unrealistic to save everything that future generations might possibly want. The little girl, like me, will survive if the painting isn't kept. She'll have other pieces to inherit - ones that her family had loved enough to save. I've got plenty of my grandfather's things. And my grandmother's and my mother's and my father's. If everything had been saved, I wouldn't have room to walk in my apartment. I got rid of thousands of things that were saved for me - thanks to Gram's hoarding that got worse once my grandfather and mother weren't there to convince her to let things go.
I might think I wanted the guitar, but realistically, I probably would have sold it anyhow - too big to display easily, plus the giant amp I remember would have been a pain to store, and I can't play one anyhow!Posted 12 months ago # -
if the thing is a reasonably-executed reasonable likeness, then i can see an effort being made to preserve it.
if it is just a daub, then let it go.
hmmmm, i have been decluttering all my life and i do not regret one single item i have given or thrown or recycled away.
i do not pine over what has gone. i am focussed on what is yet to come...and what is happening right now.i have the last letter my grandmother ever wrote to me...it is full of bright amusing inconsequential chat about things we were interested in together...but i didn't keep every single other letter she ever wrote to me.
it doesn't mean i didn't love her dearly and miss her often.
it just means that i am not carting a huge pile of moulding paper through my life.
and i'd trade the last letter for one more chance to cook lunch for her and hang out for an afternoon.
or perhaps buy her a keyring.Posted 12 months ago # -
lol bandicoot- you are a pip! buy her a keyring indeed!!
Posted 12 months ago # -
My mother passed away last year. I kept several things she made when she was young. She wasn't the best artist, but she was my mother. She made a big Santa face pitcher and matching little Santa mugs in a ceramics class. It is the absolute coolest thing I display at Christmas.
My son & his wife buy cardboard junk from IKEA to decorate their home. My daughter-in-law was raised in Henderson, NV, a suburb of Las Vegas, home of the cheap & plastic. She even has a certification in applying eyelash extensions. My daughter, on the other hand, covets my antiques. I just gave her a primitive dry sink she has been wanting for years. I am happy to have one child who appreciates my taste!
Since you are holding the painting, why don't you try displaying it in your home? Maybe the guest room? If your niece ever comes to visit, she will be very impressed with the decor!Posted 12 months ago # -
You could take a good quality photo of the original and then cut down the painting as you suggested. Depending on how small the altered painting is, you could frame both the photo and the painting together, either a horizontal or vertical layout. You might need to have a mat cut, but if you make the photo and painting a standard size, you might be able to find a pre-cut mat to fit into a pre-made frame.
That or frame the photo and the altered painting separately, using matching frames. I have seen photo frames, which consist of 2 pieces of acrylic and clips to hold them together. The artwork is "sandwiched" between the 2 pieces of acrylic. Being lightweight would keep shipping costs down.
Posted 12 months ago #
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