Framemaker Troy Stafford on the archaic craft of custom-built frames
What if you inherited a 16th century painting, and it needed a frame worthy of its antiquity and value? Where could you have a frame made that would be handcrafted and of authentic period design? Well, you could go to Troy Stafford’s studio on the Westside of Santa Cruz and consult on a custom-made frame. “I’m a bit of a secret,” Stafford says, as he adds the sixth coat of red clay to one of his frames.
The light slanting down from high windows illuminates his studio, which, save for a large power saw, might have looked familiar to Caravaggio and Botticelli. In this room, arrayed with walls of hand chisels, small vats of rabbit-skin glue and racks holding carved alder wood moulding, the framemaker works long hours finishing commissions from artists, galleries and collectors all over the country. Nothing is rushed, nothing is commercially procured. Every inch of his custom frames is made from scratch—from milling to carving to gilding.
Light jazz and the dry scent of freshly sanded wood fill the studio. The Dalai Lama beams down from one wall while Stafford’s brush glides back and forth applying layers of gesso and earth-clay undercoating. The virtuosity of his work stunned me. Here were frames exactly like I’d seen at the Uffizi and the Louvre, detailed with sgraffito tracery, hand-punched reposé at the seamless joints and satiny 23-karat-gold finishes. Frames fit for a pre-Raphaelite masterpiece or a Titian. In fact, one of the small “tabernacle” frames Stafford is currently carving is destined for a small Titian nativity for the Kress Collection at the North Carolina Museum of Art.
Born in Merced, Stafford grew up in Las Vegas, “mostly drawing pictures and skateboarding. I was always the artsy-fartsy kid,” he admits, brushing red clay bole onto the frames. After an unsatisfying stint at Oakland’s California College of the Arts, he landed at a design school in Denver where a job at a frame shop launched his rare skills. “Since they didn’t do gilding at the shop I taught myself how to do it. I got some old books, found whatever I could, and contacted a few people,” he says. Stafford found that most experts were “very guarded” about sharing their secrets. After several years of experimenting with antique methods of framemaking and gilding, Stafford decided to go out on his own. He and his wife moved to New England and started a family. His reputation grew, but so did his weariness with cold winters. “My hands were freezing all the time,” he says with a grin. “And the rabbit-skin glue kept spoiling.”
Stafford’s main work table is surrounded by a wall of chisels, engraving burins, punches, and handmade carving tools. Glues, brushes, paper towels, gessos made of rabbit-skin glue and whiting, saws, racks, paint, scales, jars, cabinets, sketches and mock-ups of works-in-progress. The rabbit-skin glue that literally holds everything together, warms to an exact temperature—“it will fall apart if it’s too cool or too warm,” he says—in a vat nearby. “Being a Buddhist vegan, I naturally have some trouble with the rabbit skin,” he says. Jars of handmade red clay and black clay, all water based, wait to be painted onto the freshly gessoed wood. “No chemicals,” Stafford says with a nod.
Projects in various stages of completion await his attention. Mortise and tenon joints strengthen the elegant mitred corners, polished into seamless bevels. All will be painted, sanded and painted again with coats of liquid clay. As many as six or seven more coats of clay are added. “The next day, I’ll gild it,” he explains. Gilding with gold leaf is tricky. “I paint on water, then pick up the gold leaf with a squirrel-hair brush. It’s too thin to actually touch by hand. As I lay it over the wood, it adheres to the frame by static electricity. It sucks the gold down onto the wood. Then there’s burnishing. Then that dries,” he says.
And while his frames are beautiful and unique, he admits that his work takes him to the financial edge.
“California is sort of apocalyptic right now,” Stafford says. “What I do is antiquarian. Most people don’t care about this level of authenticity. Many framers can do something that approximates it, faster and cheaper. But if you look close enough, the difference is there.” Indeed, it is.
“There’s a misconception that I’m phenomenally expensive,” Stafford says. But for what he produces, he’s a bargain. The elegant black clay with gilt liner frames I see in the studio are priced in the hundreds, not thousands, of dollars. Most of the work in his studio is for artists’ shows. Yet he’s done astonishingly large-scale frames, such as the 10’ x 12’ black clay architectural frame for Grayden Parrish’s 9/ll project in New Britain, Connecticut. And museum work like this Titian tabernacle he’s doing, hand carving each of the small columns that will frame the rare painting. He has framed Botticellis and Alma-Tademas, and a Van Gogh for the De Young Museum. Working long painstaking hours, “just doesn’t bother me. Sure, I’d like to work for one of the large museums, I’d love to have a paycheck and benefits,” he says with a smile. But Stafford, his wife and three daughters are “a family of Buddhist practice,” and it was their teacher and the Land of Medicine Buddha community that drew him to Santa Cruz last year. He continues applying the layers of red and black undercoat to the frames, his hands moving firmly and gracefully along the length of sanded wood. “Every aspect has to be handmade. It seems so archaic,” he says. “You can’t rush it.” Visit staffordframes.com for more information.
ANTIQUARIAN CRAFT Troy Stafford in his studio on the Westside of town, where he builds and finishes custom frames. PHOTO: CHIP SCHEUER
