The Field Notes company is known for their one-of-a-kind, limited edition cover, memo notebooks, so when they expanded their offices they knew they wanted to represent themselves through the artwork in their space. Michele Seiler, Brand Manager for Field Notes, has known and worked with our picture framing expert Mary for years and trusted Mary’s expertise to guide them in the right direction. “She has framed art for us before and we knew we could trust her with our new pieces for our new office space. Mary will come up with options for us all of which we end up being happy with.”
For their new main floor office space, they needed to frame and install new artwork. The two-story, open industrial space features open white walls and clean lines with pops of color. Each work of art they chose poses special significance to the team at Field Notes and bears meaning reaching into the company’s story, ranging from a protest photo pulled from a book they promoted to an architectural shot of a building at which they hosted an event to a local Chicago artist they collaborated with, “We had about seven pieces framed that included a photo of author John Irving with one of our notebooks, a black and white photograph of Crown Hall, a photograph of a scene from protests at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, a series of art prints from Chicago artist Jay Ryan, and another piece of art by Jay Ryan. Each of those is art pieces of things that we love and wanted to showcase in our space.”
“Mary Lane was instrumental in helping us pick frames and mats, making suggestions, showing us options, and helping us narrow down to a final choice.” The black and white photos and artwork they chose contrasted the space, so it was a matter of pairing those pieces with moulding that equally complimented the artwork. Since each art piece is black and white, Mary helped them choose black frames and white mats for most of the pieces.
“We used archival materials and frames that have minimal decorative intent to showcase the art itself.” Mary goes on to explain the intention behind choosing specific custom framing elements for each piece of art. “The suite of Jay Ryan prints is framed edge to edge with spacers instead of mats, to allow the pieces to hang close together, showing their relationship to each other. The protest photo and the John Irving photo have welded corner seamless frames in matte black with neutral grey mats. The T-shape of the frame allows it to appear to float on the wall.”
The final installation perfectly reflects the space and lends to not only a visual aesthetic but gives insight into the pride the Field Notes staff holds for their company history. “We are very happy with the quality of the work and are proud to show off our art in a manner that truly reflects the importance of the pieces to us. They are exactly what we wanted and the quality is fantastic.”