Palmer woman finds art in frames

EOWYN LeMAY IVEY-Frontiersman reporter

In high school and college, Pam Strahan was drawn to art classes. Then came her first two job opportunities -- one at a title company, the other as an illustrator.

"The title company called first," the Palmer mother and grandmother recalled. "I took a left when I should have taken a right."

After accepting the position at the title company, Strahan's career during the next years dealt primarily with land issues. In 1976, she and her husband moved from California to Alaska. For 25 years, she worked for the Mat-Su Borough in land management.

To this day, she wonders how differently her life might have gone if she had waited for the illustration company to call.

Along the way, though, the Palmer resident found her way back to art. In 1982, she and her husband, Jack, opened Madd Matters, a custom framing shop in Palmer. There, among the Fred Machetanz and Judi Rideout prints, the pottery and old photographs, Strahan's focus is once again on art.

Strahan said she and her husband first got interested in matting and framing because her husband enjoyed collecting prints, but the couple couldn't find anyone to frame them the way they wanted.

"We thought, 'How hard could it be?'" Strahan recalled. About $1,500 later, the couple had what she called a "decent picture" to hang on the wall. "It was much harder than we thought it would be."

The Strahans quickly discovered that custom framers keep their secrets close to their chest, and they were unable to find a mentor. Schools are available to train people in matting and framing, but the couple decided they would teach themselves. In retrospect, Strahan said, it is really the only way to learn -- to just do it.

"You can tell somebody how to do it all day … but really it's practice makes perfect," she said.

The fact that they taught themselves instead of learning by the book has resulted in their own, individual style, however.

"We do it totally differently. We do it backwards," Strahan explained. She said they eventually discovered that matters generally cut the top mat first, not the bottom. Instead, the Strahan's have worked by building from the bottom up.

Along the way, the Strahans choose the shades and textures -- sometimes suede-like blue, other times a crisp, flat white, layered together in a way that brings out the colors of the art it surrounds.

In some of the more time-demanding pieces, they hand-cut shapes and curves in the matting. In a framed Alaska State Fair print, for example, they allow the flowers in the piece to flow into the matting by cutting around them. It is in these details of shape and color that the work becomes more challenging.

"Anybody can do it," Strahan said. "The difference comes in choice of colors."

While they do sell completed, framed pieces in their shop in the Koslosky Center, Strahan said most of their work involves people bringing in photographs, prints or other items to be framed. Often, the customers have a certain idea in mind and often, Strahan said, they change their minds once they've visited the shop.

Occasionally, however, a customer will have something specific they want done and they won't budge. Then, even against their better judgment, the Strahans will do as they are asked and joke later, "Just don't tell anybody you had it done here." Sometimes it is simply a matter of taste and "some people's taste is just in their mouths," Strahan said with a laugh.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, however, the Strahans are able to step back from their finished work and see how colors, textures and shape can come together to enhance a piece of art.

But it's not always prints and paintings that they are framing. At least half of their business comes in odd-shaped forms -- goose eggs, rattlesnake hides and football shirts, to name but a few. One of the most challenging framing projects they had was an old Louis Armstrong poster and a real trumpet a man wanted framed together.

"And he wanted to be able to get the trumpet out and put it back," Strahan said.

Projects like these, along with the dozens of prints and photographs that come through their doors each year, keep the couple busy. If it weren't for their assistant, Pia Martin, Strahan said they would never be able to leave their shop.

"Our feet would be glued to the floor," she said.

Instead, the couple is able to get away from the business occasionally to enjoy other interests. When asked if they ever consider retiring to another state, however, Strahan seemed doubtful. A month or two away is great, but she said she couldn't ever imagine leaving Alaska for much longer or at all in the summer.

"The pace is so different Outside … and I don't want to move at that pace," Strahan said. "Alaska has been good to us."