ABOUT US

how does a person find themselves in the custom framing and art business? Best answer: trial and error. You can know the art, but not the business. Or believe the business is a snap, but the art is a mystery. The person who settles in has to have a good bit of both. And then it takes time to develop. In a world of instant everything, you also need patience and passion to succeed. Those qualities can be hard to come by in our technology-obsessed world. But life can take you in many directions, and so it was with us at Picture Source.

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The store had its beginnings with a local Mississauga artist by the name of Jack Jelilian. In the early 1990’s the art business was still enjoying the appetites of the pop-culture “boomers” who had grown up with new music, new ideas, and prosperity. These were the days of limited editions by artists such as Trisha Romance, Robert Bateman, Ken Danby, The Group of Seven, and of course music concert posters, and an explosion in art photography across every genre.

So Jack, his wife Annie, and their son Vaskin began opening up art stores across the Mississauga area. At their height they were operating as many as ten stores and enjoying the patronage of both customers and artists alike. But all things pass as they say, and so by the middle of the second decade of this century, the business began going through numerous changes. The boomers aged and bought less. Asia liked what they saw in the art business and began flooding North American markets with cheap art. And then behemoths like Amazon began selling everything online, including every form of art. And pretty soon, a lot of the art we see now became commoditized. Which on its own wouldn’t be so bad because every home should have a few pieces of lovely art, and if it’s more affordable so much the better. But that price also comes with many costs: first and foremost the inability of many art stores to remain in business.

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In their place have come offshore products with much lower quality, less selection, less control over the size, shape and colour of the art you want, and no one to turn to when there’s a problem with your purchase. We’ve heard countless stories from customers who thought they’d try to buy that print online with a ready-made frame. Turned out the colour wasn’t what they were expecting; the size didn’t work on their wall; or it showed up damaged; and then they were stuck with the hassle of returning it. We think that maybe a trip to your local picture store still offers a lot of value.

By the time the retail art store shakeout was done, lots of locations disappeared. Picture Source hung on, but today it operates just one store in the Milton Mall. In an e-commerce world, however, one of the missing components for Picture Source was a good website. If you’re reading this now, then hopefully you’ll enjoy our website experience. It’s designed to help customers with custom framing projects, offer a wide selection of pre-framed art, increase your art knowledge, and give you the best shopping experience possible. So we hope our website gives encourages you to bring us your favorite canvas, or diploma, or commercial custom framing job. We’re thrilled and happy to be of service to you in any way we can, and to brighten up your home and your life with affordable, beautiful and creative art.