Smith Coleman is the owner of Coleman Fine Art, an art gallery located in Charleston, SC. Working alongside his wife (and now the gallery’s sole painter), he fabricates frames for the pieces of art his wife creates. Smith shares his personal journey from unexpected gilder to successful gallery owner.
Transcript
>> I'm Smith Coleman. And I'm owner of Coleman Fine Art in Charleston, South Carolina. We're an art gallery. Art gallery, restoration studio for friends. I'm a gilder, I'm a master gilder. And I make one of a kind frames. As a gilder I work with gold. In my case, it's primarily frames and interior gilding. With a frame there's- You have the wood substrate. You have gesso on top of that - many, many layers. Then there's many sanding techniques that must go one, and then there's clay or ball that's put on top of that, which can range really from any color from white to black and full spectrum. Then you apply the gold and burnish, rub back, distress, tone, voila. There's not any one specific theme that I look for in a painting. It might be coloration. It might be texture. It might be subject matter. For instance, I did a- I did a frame for a painting that- that showed a shrimper. And he had his big shrimping nets on the- on the boat behind him. So I incorporated a net- netting in the frame. So it was just a general theme. I might do a fun, whimsical frame of an artist did a painting of pigs, little piglets. And so I did little curlicue tails within the frame. And so things like that.
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