markmarchesi.com

As I’ve mentioned, one of my hobbies is buying antique prints and framing them with reclaimed wood.  I have two shops now in Portland that sell them for me on consignment, but in the winter the retail business in Maine slows to a snails pace to say the least.  It’s just as well because I […]

This coming March, eleven prints from my project The Town and the City will be on view at Nelson Hancock Gallery in Brooklyn.  I was offered the opportunity just before the new year and immediately went to work building seven 30×40 and four 24×30 birch frames.  Many man hours later, they are all complete except […]

Wikipedia defines Ethnography as “the genre of writing that presents varying degrees of qualitative and quantitative descriptions of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork.” It goes on to say that “Cultural anthropology and social anthropology were developed around ethnographic research.” I believe this print is meant to illustrate the geographic origins of early […]

This world map came out of an 1885 edition of Cram’s Atlas. I love the layout and decorative border, and the illustrations used to fill the top and bottom are pure genius. And, it blows my mind to see that dotted line around the North Pole labeled “Highest Point Reached by Man. […]

Usually I only use pallet wood for frame backs (see below). But, I made the above frame entirely out of a dismantled pallet or “skid” as they are sometimes called. The artwork is out of a collection of posters I peeled off walls all around Athens, Greece in 2001.

I’ve finally managed to arrange a decent studio for shooting frames in my basement using techniques I learned the day my friend Michael Heiko did the shots for The Woodpile homepage.
This is a map of the North Pole from Richard Andrees Allgemeiner Handatlas published in 1881. It looks great on the wall in my […]

This is a picture of the shop with some in progress frames laid out. The saw room is to the left and these tables are where assembly and finishing take place. Final assembly takes place elsewhere on another set of cleaner tables. The large frame on the top left was one of […]

This beauty is from an 1892 George F. Cram Atlas. Figure 1 is titled “Circles & Diurnal Movements of the Celestial Sphere” and Figure 8 is “The Various Appearances of Saturn’s Rings”. Each diagram is amazing in it’s own right. Figures 2 and 3 are very detailed and technical. I don’t understand […]

I have recently developed a fascination with antique prints - especially maps, and somewhat of an addiction to shopping for them. Here is one taken from The Century Atlas printed in 1897. It is a beautiful rendering of Maine with an inset detail map of Mt Desert Island before the establishment of Acadia […]

My friend Michael Heiko and I shot these seven pieces in his studio and then I made this composite for the opening page of my framing website.  All of these frames are made entirely out of reclaimed wood.  I cut down architectural salvage, discarded furniture, dismantled pallets and crates, etc. to make contemporary, museum quality […]