The Art of Framing: A Legacy of Craftsmanship
Denis Kosnar is carefully working on a 2.6-metre python skin, unrolling it and flattening it with clamps and weights. On one side, he applies snake oil (or more accurately, glycerin), while on the other, rubbing alcohol. This meticulous process has been ongoing for several weeks, since a woman entered his shop and pulled the skin from her bag. She claimed that her relative had shot and killed the snake in Sri Lanka 20 years ago.
Kosnar, who has spent 61 years as a framer, says this is a first for him. “See, there are the creases there,” he says, tracing his finger over the snake’s scales through his phone screen. “We’re starting to get rid of them.”
The Kosnar family has been in the framing business for generations. Seventy-three years ago, his father, John (Jan) Kosnar, started the family business, working out of a small shed at Ferny Creek in the Dandenong Ranges. A Czechoslovakian migrant, John brought picture framing and gilding skills to Australia. By the time Denis was 14, he was already an apprentice in their new shop in Moonee Ponds in Melbourne’s north-west — the family’s first major commercial move.
At its peak, Kosnar’s supplied most picture framers in Australia and New Zealand, and John was formally recognized as the founder of Australia’s industry for picture frame mouldings. A factory and dozens of employees (85 at its height) came and went before financial troubles in the 1990s forced the business to scale back. Today, what remains are two workshops and a quaint storefront in Ascot Vale, a suburb just beyond where Kosnar, now 75, began his journey.
The corner shop still proudly displays old signage declaring “Kosnar’s” from all angles. The bell chimes when you pull on the door’s golden handle, and inside, Julie — who has worked for the business for a decade — uses a ruler and a cardboard pricing chart (dated 1993) to calculate quotes. There’s no computerization of customer orders here; Kosnar believes paper records last longer, as computer programs change and documents are lost. Instead, thick record books fill the shelves in a back room cluttered with hangers, screws, brackets, glues, tools, and a small workbench.
“When I first came to work here, it was like walking into Dickens,” Julie says, speaking over soft classical music. She waves off a request to publish her surname, insisting she stays “under the radar.”
Hand-constructed ornate frames and mirrors, many gilded by Denis, take up most of the shop’s surfaces, except for a sliver of red carpet. “We frame an awful lot of things,” Julie says. “You’d be surprised.” There was the wedding dress — a big tulle gown with a beaded bodice and empire waist — and last year, a woman came in with a full-face medical mask, with holes cut into it for the eyes. She was in remission after wearing it during cancer treatment.
Julie defers to Kosnar, who brings up those golden underpants they put in a showcase frame a few years ago. “It was a prize for doing something,” he says, “but it’s probably best not to be known what it was for.”
For all Kosnar’s years, he can’t choose a favorite project (to do so would be like “choosing a favourite child”) — and Kosnar’s are still not Melbourne’s oldest framers. That title belongs to Jarman, the cavernous counterpart to Kosnar’s curiosity, acquired by artists’ services company Chapman and Bailey in 2014. Founded in 1879 by John Thallon and his brother Thomas, the combined business today operates out of a Willy Wonka-style, multistorey building in Abbotsford in Melbourne’s inner north.
The showroom and gallery is merely the taster before the gilding room, the ornamental room, the mounting room, and the spraying room, where a metres-high curtain of water filters out excess paint. The Jarmans are long gone from the business, but the framers’ legacy remains, particularly in ornamental specialist Ying Huang.
Beneath hodgepodge plants and old window mounts hung from the ceiling, she cooks up composite in heavy metal pots, before pressing the material into hand-cast ornamental moulds — the main attraction for owner Mark Chapman, who bought Jarman to keep the practice alive.
Huang trained under Tom Whitfield, the last of Jarman Framing’s original ornamental specialists, before he retired in 2020. Nowadays, Jarman stocks a frame dubbed the “Tom special.” “One day I’ll have a frame in my name,” Huang says.
On the showroom floor, clientele clearly see the value in Jarman’s craft. Two consultants — one, in a tweed vest with thick, black-rimmed glasses — cling to the side of a suited gentleman, who is weighing up framing options for an oil painting on a video call to his wife.
The priciest frames here — all of which are museum-quality — can cost up to $30,000. At Kosnar’s, the maximum price is more like $8,000. But when I ask Kosnar what the most valuable item they’ve framed is, his answer isn’t monetary.
The most valuable objects they frame are sentimental.
