Many artists don't title or sign their work. Probably less than half label the back with this basic information, and perhaps only a small minority catalogue their work. I do all of these things, plus have print quality digital images of (just about) all of my 1000+ artworks - but not all have frame photographs. Not all are framed, and the early ones were not framed as well as I'd now prefer. I framed them quickly to show off and enter into things, those were the days. Now I paint and seal them up in tombs; but of course, they come out when the time is right.
I started the day by working out what I might show or sell online. Almost every gallery I've approached in the past 15 years has ignored me, so it makes sense to prepare for selling my work online. I can do this, but I dislike the idea generally, partly because the paintings look much better in real life and are somehow devalued by being turned into 'digital' commodities. One of my main reasons I started to paint was that it was not digital, I wanted to escape the digital world. But; I have hundreds of paintings and nowhere to display them. I've sold one or two paintings online before, and I need both the money and the space.
My investigations led to which paintings I have photographed in their frames, and which not. Most with newer and better frames do have frame photographs. I started by amending my master list of artworks with little flags to indicate which images are photographed/scanned, and which included framed photographs.
I also needed to find the works themselves. The storage room upstairs is now a spider's pantry of artworks wrapped in cling-film silk. All have labels on the back, but those are often hidden when wrapped, so I decided to stock-take and label everything, and to photograph a few paintings in frames.
So, in the afternoon, I ran up and down stairs, noting, labelling, wrapping and unwrapping painting after painting. I photographed 7 works, with 3 more sharing frames (they use identical off-the-shelf) frames. One notably hand-made frame which hasn't been photographed before is the one for 'The Fictitious Secret History of Aspartame', here:
It's not a trivial process to get ideal images like the above. The small ISO and huge F-stop means an exposure time of 5 seconds or so, and the image needs careful placement to be square-on. As I write, 199 paintings (or drawings) have images in frames. I've got a lot done in terms of labels, I may continue for another day or two.
