On the week of Oct. 22 I brought a canvas art print to the Lockport Street Gallery for framing and matting services. The print has an image size of 18" x 13" with a white border around the image. The print bears two signatures; the one copied into the print and a hand signed gold signature from the artist. Lockport Street Gallery charged me $65 for labor and approximately $60 for ten linear feet of materials. Tax brought the total to $135.
I went to pick up the print on Sunday, October 28th. Upon a cursory inspection my wife and I discovered several nicks in the frame. I immediately brought the print back in and identified the nicks to the owner. He said he would fix them and I left the print there. When we picked up the print on Thursday, November 1, we noticed several more problems with the framing. The matting overlaps the picture by 1/4" on all sides and obscures the gold signature. The canvas itself is not very tight and at the top of the picture there are visible waves in the print near the stretcher bars. On the back of the print, the canvas was very poorly folded and consequently, the back is very lumpy.
My wife called Lockport Street Gallery to inform them of the problems she found and asked them to remedy them. The owner's first response was that "it must have happened after you took it home". The problems observed could not have happened by simply transporting the print. When my wife pointed this out, he made a statement to the effect that there was poor lighting in his work area and we probably weren't going to do business with him again anyway. My wife replied that we paid a lot of money for the framing and simply wanted it done correctly. At that point he hung up on her.
It's strange that a business that is so reliant on word of mouth business would have such terrible customer service to support very unprofessional workmanship.
A second gallery agreed that the framing was very substandard and that a significant portion of the picture was covered. They also believe that complete re-framing would be the only way to correct the problem. They informed us that the print might be damaged due to the way it was connected to the stretcher bars and the gold signature might be lost if the picture was removed from the frame. Because we don't want to lose the print, we are stuck with a poorly framed print that cost a lot of money.
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