The Bigger Picture at Sunshine Coast Art & Framing
A frame doesn’t just protect a memory, it gives meaning to a moment in time. Jodie Cameron gets hung up on the art of framing.
Is a home really a home without art or photo frames? I’m forever wishing I had more wall space or one more surface to display everything I’ve collected over the years, it’s what makes a house feel lived in. Frames draw a boundary, saying ‘this mattered, look closer’.
Few people understand that better than Jeff McColl who, together with his wife Lis, own Sunshine Coast Art & Framing in Noosa and Minyama. Born in Canada, Jeff met Lis in Lake Louise while she was backpacking, and he moved to Australia in 1996. Following a trip home to visit Jeff’s family and friends in 2010, they both returned looking for a change of scenery and decided to move where they holidayed every year – the Sunshine Coast.
After a varied career in media and communications, Jeff never expected to end up owning a picture‑framing business. Between jobs, he was renovating their home when a casual comment to an ex-boss led to a phone call for a role running day-to-day operations for Sunshine Coast Art & Framing.
“I’m kind of good with people,” Jeff says. “It was a pivotal time for their business, and I think they had other interests, other things they wanted to do. So it worked out well for everyone.”
It was a comment made in passing at a Christmas function years later, that changed everything.
“If you ever do sell, I’d like to be your first conversation,” Jeff told him.
True to his word, when the previous owners were ready to step back, Jeff and Lis took over and have just completed their first full year as owners. Though the name and the framing
have stayed the same, the couple’s fingerprints are all over the business now – not by overhauling it, but by building on what already worked.
“One of the first things we did was stabilise the team,” Jeff says. “This business runs on the people in it and that’s what makes it what it is. You can’t buy that, you just have to look after it.”
Joel, the business’s master framer of over 30 years, has skills and facilities that go well beyond the ordinary, he’s the kind other framers in the industry sometimes call on when a job needs something they’re not equipped to handle themselves.
“Joel is an absolute legend in the game,” Jeff says. “If Joel can’t frame it, no one can.”
Sunshine Coast Art & Framing operates from two sites – Noosa and Minyama – but Jeff is quick to point out they’re the same business and it’s a distinction he’s keen for locals to understand.
“It doesn’t matter which store you visit,” Jeff says. “You’re dealing with the same friendly faces, the same craftsmanship, and the same care.”
It’s this kind of service that makes the real difference because for Jeff and his team, no one frames something that isn’t important to them. One recent job involved framing a Vietnam War-era uniform, complete with the soldier’s ID card and photograph. It wasn’t just fabric or paper, it was sentimental and deserved to be preserved so it could be on display, not tucked away in a cupboard.
“You can put a face and a name to it, it’s a real person, not just some guy who never made it home,” Jeff says. “Every customer’s story is genuine, it’s a memory, a piece of a family, a piece of history.”
Beyond the shopfront, Jeff and Lis have built the business into something of a community fixture. They are long-time supporters of local art prizes, deliberately structuring prize money so even a third-place win covers the cost of framing.
“I don’t do it expecting sales in return,” Jeff says. “I do it because we work with a lot of local artists, and I feel it’s the right thing to do because third place is a big deal too.”
That same philosophy extends to Wishlist, a charity close to Jeff’s heart from his own days working there. In September, Sunshine Coast Art & Framing will frame up to 300 anonymous artworks for the charity’s fundraiser, where artworks are sold for $100 each without buyers knowing who painted what until after purchase.
They’ve also partnered with True Colours, framing artwork from special-needs students and giving it a proper gallery-quality opening – and an occasion these young artists might otherwise never have had.
“That one still gives me goosebumps,” Jeff says. “Before this, they’d scramble for cheap frames and stick it up in a café. Now they get a proper opening night with their work on display where it deserves to be.”
The Minyama store also plays host to changing exhibitions that showcase the team’s own creative talents outside the shop floor – from gallery manager Anna’s origami-style artwork to Ayesha, a competition body-painter by night who somehow still finds two days a week to spend at the shop. It’s a rotating reminder that the people framing your memories are often artists and makers in their own right.
If the smiles and spring in the staff’s steps are anything to go by, it’s clear this is more than just a job for the people who work there – it’s a place they genuinely want to be. Which might be the real secret to Sunshine Coast Art & Framing’s success. In the end, that’s what a good frame and a good business really does: it doesn’t just hold something in place, it gives it a story worth sharing.
