Now that the never-ending renovation has finally ended, we are working on decorating. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, knocking down two walls has left us with more wall space to fill, and we are filling it with art.
My wife’s sister’s husband is an artist, and we have several of his original works. My best friend’s wife is also an artist, and we have one of her works as well. We also have some homemade collages and posters derived from personal photos. After all that, we still have blank walls, so we wanted to get some reproductions of some of the fine art that we’ve always liked. To our mutual surprise, my wife and I share similar tastes in art, which made the whole shopping experience an order of magnitude less painful. Your mileage may vary.
All the major art sites offer posters, framed prints, and a (typically limited) selection of canvas prints. Canvas printing is the look we were going for — it looks less like a dorm room poster and more like an actual artist’s canvas. Framed prints are also nice, and you can choose the exact frame and mat style to match the art. For canvas, you typically buy the canvas “stretched,” which means that the art comes pre-installed on its own wooden frame and the canvas wraps around the edges. There are two variations of stretched canvas, which some sites call “museum wrap” and “gallery wrap”. Museum-wrapped canvas prints the picture on the canvas up to (and possibly slightly beyond) the front edge where the canvas wraps around the frame. Gallery-wrapped canvas prints the picture to the edge of the physical canvas and then wraps it around the frame, so if you look at the canvas from the side you’ll see some of the picture along the edges. I think gallery-wrapped looks better, but only for art where you can afford to lose an inch or so around each side. Good for Sunrise, bad for Color Study.
The top two contenders for buying art online are Art.com and AllPosters.com. Both have essentially the same catalog of prints; from my limited research, I found each print I cared about at both sites. Unfortunately, both have a limited selection of stretched canvas. I ended up buying two canvases from AllPosters.com, and I am not entirely happy with them. Both canvases were museum-wrapped; AllPosters does not appear to offer a choice about this. One of them was a black-and-white drawing by Picasso, but the edges of the canvas were painted black, which bothers me and detracts from the piece. The other was a Diego Rivera print which also came with black borders, but the colors are dark all around so you don’t notice the borders as much. However, the canvas itself appears shiny, almost glossy, like getting a glossy photograph when you were expecting a matte. Hard to describe exactly, but it doesn’t feel like a canvas. It feels like a poster on slightly different paper. It’s actually presented a practical problem, because it reflects light badly in the place where we thought we were going to hang it.
The other place I found, which I actually liked a lot, was ImageKind.com. They offer a much wider selection of stretched canvas — almost everything they sell can be printed on canvas, as opposed to Art.com and AllPosters.com which had a separate section of canvas prints with very limited selection. And the canvases themselves were a better match for my expectations. The frame is about one inch deep, compared to two inches for the AllPosters.com canvases I bought. And the canvas itself seems to be much higher quality. The final product looks more like an original piece of art.
ImageKind also offers prints and framing services, neither of which I bought. Intriguingly, they offer a service where someone will apply additional brush strokes to the canvas after the digital transfer, for an additional (unspecified) fee. I did not buy this because I didn’t discover it until my canvases had arrived, so I don’t know how much of a difference it would make. I might try it if I buy anything else.
If fine art is not your thing, you can make canvas prints from your own photographs. I’ve used WinkFlash.com for several homemade posters and one canvas print. I’m happy with all of them. The canvas prints are only available “gallery-wrapped,” and the site goes to great pains to explain this to you (since it results in part of the original being wrapped around the edges). The photograph I chose to print on canvas didn’t have much detail around the edges, so the wrapping wasn’t an issue. The canvas itself is good quality, and “feels” like a canvas (like the fine art reproductions I bought from ImageKind). Of course there is no “artist’s original” canvas, since the source was just a digital photograph. Still, it’s a nice way to make a special photograph into a keepsake. The posters I’ve printed have also come out well, and all arrived undamaged.
ImageKind offers some custom framing options, but I’ve never tried them. Two of the posters went into $5 plastic “frames” from Target; a third went into a nicer (but still pre-made) wooden frame that I bought at a local craft store. If you really want a custom frame, I’m not sure it would be any cheaper to go local; you may just want to buy it pre-framed and be done with it.
I have no affiliation with any of these companies beyond buying the products I’ve mentioned here.
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I’ve bought one hand-made reproduction off e-bay and it was ok — good enough for my purpose. The canvas was pretty cheap looking and the reproduction wasn’t perfect of course, but having a canvas with hand painted strokes was nice for the $10 or $12 I paid (for unstretched canvas).
— Abhik 
I’m a painter myself, so I don’t really have any trouble filling my walls. I have to say though that I think canvas prints are generally pretty awful looking. Furthermore, “gallery wrap” is a *terrible* idea. It’s not just details at the edge of the painting that are lost; it’s essentially cropping a half inch or so off the whole thing which fundamentally changes the composition of the piece which any good artist will have put considerable thought into. I would consider such a thing very disrespectful to the artist. I cringe at the thought of anyone ever mounting one of my canvases “gallery wrap”.
For the prices that those sites are charging for prints, I would instead seriously consider purchasing real, original art from a more unknown artist. Etsy is 90% crap, but there are hidden gems and there’s enough there that you ought to be able to find something that you like. Buying original works directly from the artist I think is ultimately much more fulfilling than buying a print of something famous.
Well, as I mentioned, we do have a significant number of original works already. Besides the ones from friends of the family, we also have several originals that I inherited from various deceased relatives. And my parents, despite not being dead, were kind enough to part with a beautiful wall-mounted sculpture that we had over the fireplace mantle when I was growing up. It’s now over my mantle, now that I have my own. It’s fun to show people pictures taken in front of the fireplace when I was growing up, and watch them do a double-take when they realize that the same sculpture from the 20-year-old picture is now “in person” over our mantle.
— Mark
Blank walls are for bookcases.
— Karl
Good choice with the Mirò painting! If you’re ever in Barcelona (and like Mirò), I heartily recommend the Mirò museum.
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