The Maker's Table: Charly and Javier Ternero
A painter, a framer and photographer, and the little gallery in Selkirk they built together and three Yarrow watercolours that hang on the walls of The Scullery.
On the corner of Market Place in Selkirk, the hill town that sits where the Ettrick and Yarrow valley meet, there is a small gallery you could walk past if you didn’t know to look. Inside,the walls are hung with paintings, there are cards and art materials on the shelves, and Radio3 is playing quietly.
When you come in, Charly or Javier will say hello and tell you about the artists if you want to know or leave you to look in peace if you’d rather.
The back room belongs to Javier, who makes frames there by hand. This is Burnside Gallery, and it is run by two people who happen also to be married to each other.
Charly is from the Borders. Javier comes from Seville. Charly trained in typographical design at the London College of Printing and then retrained in figure painting at Glasgow School of Art and the Art Students League of New York, part-time, because she had to earn the money to learn.
She paints and draws: the wood, the riverbank, the dry stone dykes winding up the hills, the Forestry Commission trees that she once described as showing almost black,hurtling down the hill like steam trains.
She paints the Yarrow Valley because it is where she lives, in a cottage she and Javier spent a year and a half repairing, and because, as she puts it, she wants to share the images she sees around her.
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The stories we make up about things and places, and to communicate what delights me about the world.
Three of Charly’s watercolours hang in The Scullery. Guests ask about them more than almost anything else in the cottage — where the places are, whether they can buy one. They are of the valley just outside the window: the same hills, the same water, painted by someone who has spent years learning to look at them properly. To have a painting of the Yarrow on the wall, made by a painter who lives in the Yarrow, is a particular kind of pleasure, and it is one of the quiet reasons the cottage feels of its place rather than simply in it.
Javier has two crafts. The first is photography, he works in the old processes — cyanotype, albumen, silver gelatin prints — the chemistry of early photography, slow and physical and unrepeatable. His subjects range from the Borders to the Andes, from Castilla-León to the Roma and Traveller communities he has photographed over many years.
The second craft is framing: Javier makes traditional frames by hand from oak, ash, walnut, tulipwood and maple. He will listen to the history of whatever you bring him — a painting, a photograph, a child’s drawing, a medal — and work out with you what it needs: the right moulding, whether it wants a mount or glass, what finish will suit it. Floating frames, hand-finished bevels, mounts cut to show the deckled edge of the paper. His eye for it is, quite simply, the best I know.
Together they have built something that is increasingly rare: a working gallery in a small Borders town that shows the work of local and international artists, as well as their own. If you are visiting the valley, Burnside is worth the short drive into Selkirk. Go and say hello. Take something to be framed. Buy a painting of the hills you’ve been walking. And if you’ve stayed with us and admired the watercolours on the wall, now you know whose they are.
Burnside Gallery & Frames, 48 Market Place, Selkirk TD7 4BL. Open Wednesday to Saturday, 9.30–1 and 2–4. See charlyternero.co.uk and javierternerophotography.com, or the gallery at burnsidegallery.co.uk and on Instagram @burnsidegallery.