It is clear that David O’Brien, owner of Picture This Framing Center & Gallery, has a 25-year background in marketing and sales. For instance, he knows just how long to wait before asking browsing customers if he can help them find something.
And his next question is a joke. Well, kind of.
“Can I get you a shopping cart?” he says.
O’Brien is a hands-on manager, and during the last 15 years, he has built his Wickenden Street frame-and-poster shop into a three-location business. Although he is not an artist, all of his 11 staffers are. And just as importantly, he is devoted to local artists. That is part of the reason why he has taken on a new task: coordinating gallery showings in his store, the first of which was held with photographer Ken Franckling last Friday.
The Franckling event also marked the grand opening celebration for his newest location. Two years ago, O’Brien opened a 900-square-foot Downtown store on Weybosset Street and, last month, he moved that store across the street to a space twice as big.
His Downtown location – with a 52-foot length of brick wall that dates back to 1876 when the building was built – is across from the proposed 110 Westminster St. project and two doors down from the Hampton Inn & Suites that is set to open later this year.
“I came over one day and I looked at that wall and said it was perfect,” he said. “It’s perfect for photography and it’s perfect for antique maps.”
It is also a location that he is planning to keep open later on Friday nights. “Because on Friday night, there are a lot of people who meander around in the city after they get out of work. Or if they want to go out for a drink,” they can stop by here, too, he said.
The storefront’s façade is glass, and some of Richard Benjamin’s Rhode Island photography – which O’Brien has carried exclusively for 15 years – is in the front window.
The exclusivity deal with Benjamin is one of O’Brien’s key marketing efforts for the store, and he has sold more than 5,000 of the artist’s photos. While he carries all local artists, and no other photography, with few exceptions, “being able to say you have an exclusive is [great], it’s not often that an artist will do that,” he said.
But just having a store on the East Side, “we never had access to the Downtown market, because the Downtown people, once they park their cars, are stuck,” said O’Brien. “So we got very little of Downtown out of Wickenden Street.”
And the Downtown location seems to be working for Picture This. A diverse crowd stops by the Downtown store. Many are “map junkies” that O’Brien knows by name. They stop by each of the Picture This locations – including the Wakefield branch, which opened in 1997 – scouring inventory, noting dates and quality. But there are also passersby who are just looking for something local to decorate their apartments and houses.
Some of the maps aren’t cheap, either. They can range from about $100 to between $500 and $600. They can cost more than $1,000 or $2,000, O’Brien said. Many are sliced from the pages of Providence Plat Maps from the 1870s to the 1930s. Those books are rare – though it’s unclear exactly how many are around. Because the oversized books can’t be kept on bookshelves, most were in basements or on floors and were destroyed in the 1938 and 1954 hurricanes, O’Brien said.
Finding Providence maps and others is a job in itself, he said. O’Brien’s maps come from estate sales, brokers and private collections around the world. A few months ago, he bought a Little Compton map from somebody in England.
The custom framing is unique for each “and you can go to any price level that you want, within reason,” he said. The 3,500 frame styles that O’Brien carries range from thin poster frames to scrafito-carved pieces that have blackened top layers covering 22-carat gold.
Standing at the work table in the Weybosset store, O’Brien walked through the process framing – pulling colors out of a photo to match the matte board and the frame material. He lined up a photo of a horse race next to a blue matte board, to match the jockey’s shirt, and brown frame, matching the horse’s coloring.
“So, that gives it a finished look,” he said. He gestured to the brick wall covered with maps and photos. “Now if you look at any well-framed piece of art, your eye goes directly to the image and then it goes to the matte, then it picks up the frame.” •
company profile
Picture This Framing
Center & Gallery
Owner: David O’Brien
Location: 158 Wickenden St. and
45 Weybosset St. in Providence;
552 Kingstown Road Wakefield
Employees: 11
Year Established: 1993
Annual Sales: WND
