At the end of March, a telephone call from the Office Manager of PSG Equity in Sloane Square, London, with the simple request of a couple of BIG pictures for the public area of their offices. How big? What type of picture? What space? The,' How Big' was determined to be over a metre. That part is no problem for the majority of my pictures. What was a problem was the height.
Most framers limit the height of a frame and despite my best efforts, even using specialist framers, this was a problem. Previous large installations have been made using a vinyl 'wallpaper' (e.g. Southampton Airport over 7 metres wide) but this wasn't suitable here.
I did makes some recommendations and suggestions for classic framed and glazed, and more contemporary Box Framed laminated prints which, whilst the style of the box was liked, it was clear they really wanted much larger pictures to fill over 2 metres width.
What about a triptych? This is usually either three similar images displayed together or as in this case , one image divided into three and displayed close together. I bounced the idea to them with some examples, based on the maximum height we could manufacture, and scaled proportionately to the picture format of 3:2. They loved the idea and the order was live!
Okay, now to make the pictures. The images were taken with high resolution cameras (36mp full frame) and professional lenses which are fine ground (70-200 F2.8) and taken at high speed to produce images that were sharp in detail where they needed to be for me. But, these raw images had to be processed to black and white; interpolated to the size required; with tones dodged and burnt (lightened and darkened) in specific areas for that size to produce the detail in the finished prints that I was happy with.
After that, there is a phenomenon with single image triptychs. If you take an image, divide it vertically into three, separate it to make the triptych, any diagonal lines - sails for example - will not line up. Try it with a square piece of paper. Draw a diagonal line. Cut the paper in two vertically and separate the two pieces. You will see that the line doesn't match when separated. We then had to determine what gap was required between each of the three pictures in the finished position - 5cm in this case. Each image was then processed and cut with this gap in place. Voila! The sail lines seem to match up, (but now won't if placed together!).
The pictures where finished, laminated, set in a box frame, sent and delivered to London some three weeks after the initial enquiry, and hung a couple of days later. Attached are client images of the finished display together with the following comments:
"Dear Ian
I hope this finds you well and having a good week. I’m writing to send you pictures as promised– I cannot really put into words just how much we love them and what a difference they have made to our office! I have never had so many comments as I have done today!
You have been an absolute pleasure to work with- we could not have imagined creating this artwork without your knowledge, expertise and guidance. You really understood the look we were after from day 1 and these images capture the entire essence of PSG so perfectly.
Thank you again for all your help and feel free to share these pictures with potential clients should you wish to! You should be very proud of them!
~Caro"
I'm chuffed that the plan came together!
Ian