Mat Color: Black vs White

[Pastiche]

Scott's got it.
The fact is - 98% of all galleries and museums want/use white matts. It's part tradition, but also largely - again, like Scott said - you dont want your matt to show up your print. When printing on warm paper, get a warm matt, cold toned paper, colder matt. You NEVER want your matt to be brighter than your highlights, b/c as your eye flows over the image, it's naturaly going to go tot the brightest spot... if it's the matt, the viewer is no longer looking at your image.

While black matts may look elegant, there should be a dam good reason for using them... it's just part of convention that they not be used. And, since they are hardly ever used, now, if you hang in black, everyone will be oogling your matts.. not the work. I dont recomend it when hanging in public.

Whether to matt - "full bleed" which shows the entire paper, to it's edge, and then gives a gap all around, or "over matted" which necessarily encroaches on the image a touch- is totaly a matter of taste.

Whatever you do with matt board, you want to make sure that it's not "wild", as no one wants to look at the matt. Keep it low key, in the "background"...

 

[Ed Sukach]

The mat color is all part of the great mystery of What "Works" and What Doesn't. I've been pondering that one for some time, now, and I don't think I'm any closer to the answer than when I started.

I remember Herb Ritts' show at the MFA in Boston. All the work had black, canvas textured mats ... and It all seemed to WORK. That show populated five (5) LARGE rooms in the museum.

If anything, I tend (n.b. "tend") to match the "key" with the mat. A high-key image seems to work well with a white mat; low-key with black....

I do have a Nude in brilliant autumn foliage matted with a black mat, and that particular combination has an uncanny amount of "depth". It seems to rival an image viewed through a stereoscope.

Two of my gallery images here will be hung in a local show tomorrow: Shagbark Hickory ... in a black mat; and Classical Nude, in white.

 

[stevewillard]

In general, I have found that dark or colored matts appeal more to men while white matts appeal more to women. I know this sounds strange, but the correlation is very strong. I sell more prints if I frame them in white matts because it is mostly women who buy things to hang on there walls.