Canvas printing is quickly becoming an in demand service for those that want to show off their quality pictures in a way that is affordable, highly customizable and overall more impressive, compared to looking at images in a traditional photo album. There are a variety of companies, especially on the Internet, that specialize in offering the cheapest canvas prints that can accommodate even those on a tight budget.

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In 1869, at Monet’s urging, the two artists began to paint at La Grenouillere, a fashionable restaurant on the banks of the Seine near Paris. There­after they often worked together, painting the same motif side by side, and together they made an important breakthrough in their technique. Using rapid brushstrokes of brilliant hue, they evoked the reflections of the water and the sky, portraying the optical effects of what they were painting.

Without money for travel, Renoir was forced to spend most of his time in Paris. However, he enjoyed the city animation, its elegant women, and its cafes frequented by artists and writers. In April 1874, he took part in the first Impressionist exhibition with The Loge, his first painting of the world of the theater.

In 1876 Renoir settled in Montmartre, where he often painted his garden, and he also took his easel to the Moulin de la Galette, a bustling outdoor cafe close to his home, where he socialized with his painter friends. He also cultivated a network of friendships in the world of society, which sustained his career as a portraitist, and allowed him at last to lead a comfortable life.

In 1882 Renoir was able to realize his dream of traveling to Italy to study the art of the Renaissance, and to North Africa, to see its brilliant light. These two trips prompted him to question the tenets of Impressionism and attach increasing importance to traditional draftsmanship. As time went on his brushwork became softer and more delicate, and he began to favor soft pinks in his palette. His favorite subjects were female figures, whether in portraits (Young Girls at the Piano) or depictions of nudes in landscape surroundings, which he called “my nymphs.”

In 1903 he settled definitively in Cagnes-sur-Mer, near Nice in southern France. Despite the onset of paralysis in his hands, he never stopped painting large nudes, powerful and magnificent figures rendered in intense, sparkling colors. These large canvases express his ongoing love af­fair with the female body, as well as the irrepressible vitality of his appreciation for the visible world.

This article is courtesy of ‘The beginners guide to Art’ , translated from French by John Goodman, edited by Brigitte Govignon.The article was brought to you by Blue Horizon Printing , experts in premium quality canvas prints at affordable prices.

As a young man, Dali read the work of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. Alerted to the subtleties of the subconscious, he set out to transcribe them into what he called his “metaphysical painting.” Dreams and their interpretation increasingly came to dominate his work.

In 1928, Dali met Picasso and the Surrealist writer Andre Breton, and as a result joined the Surrealist movement, rapidly becoming one of its most conspicuous members. In the following years, he met Gala Eluaid, his future muse (whom he married in a solemn religious ceremony in 1958), as well as Giorgio De Chirico and Max Ernst, both of whom had a last­ing impact on his work.

Blessed with a genius for self- promotion, Dali devised a public per­sona for himself that was mystical and intriguing. He made eroticism, scatology, scandal, humor, and provocation his stock in trade, incorporating them into both his life and his work. The resulting compositions, for example, his famous vision of melting watches in a desolate dream landscape, are often surprising. Dali frequently de­picted the seashore of his youth be­hind strange hallucinations in which, for example, shells become eyes and a mountain seems to change into the head of a dog. Playing on the magic of associations, these inventions, ren­dered in technique of great precision and high finish, insist on the multiple hidden meanings of things.

Dali also applied his gifts to movie ­making. He collaborated with Luis Bunuel on An Andalusian Dog (1928) and The Golden Age (1930), and he also designed a dream sequence for Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945).

During the 1930s, Dalis indifference to politics caused a growing rift with Breton and the other Surrealists, and his flippant 1937 series of paintings “celebrating” Adolf Hitler brought about his outright expulsion from the movement. After this, Dali astonishingly reverted to a more classical style of painting, exploring traditional imagery and producing such works as the extraordinarily foreshortened Christ of St. John of the Cross (1951) and the vision­ary Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955).

Like many European artists, Dali spent the Second World War in the United States, where he cultivated a high-society clientele, had a retro­spective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1941-42), and published a sensational autobiogra­phy, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (1942). In 1948 he returned to his native Catalonia, where he resided until his death, although he was a frequent visitor in New York into the 1980s.

To the end of his life, Dali contin­ued to cultivate a provocative, living- myth persona, openly declaring his love for authority and money. On oc­casion he styled himself “Avida Dol­lars” (an anagram of his name), and he often proclaimed himself the last surviving historical Surrealist.

This article is courtesy of ‘The beginners guide to Art’ , translated from French by John Goodman, edited by Brigitte Govignon.The article was brought to you by Blue Horizon Printing ,experts in premium quality canvas prints at affordable prices.

He was never admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and his paintings were refused time and again by the jury of the Salon, which found them provocative, crudely executed, violently lit, and excessively agitated. In 1866 Cezanne became interested in still life, and in The Black Clock (ca. 1870) he hit upon an idiosyncratic rigor and balance that set his future course.

In 1872, he settled in Pontoise for a time to paint alongside Camille Pissarro, who taught him the joys and advantages of painting in the open air. His palette lightened thereafter and he began his quest for modern landscape compositions of classical solidity. In 1874 he took part in the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris. Disappointed by its poor reception, he renounced public exhibition and returned to his family’s estate outside Aix-en-Provence.

In Provence he was able to work in solitude, with a minimum of distrac­tion. While he continued to paint in the open air, he reacted against the Impressionist search for the ephemeral moment, seeking instead a formal equilibrium based on the cone, the cylinder, and the sphere. As an ob­ject’s various sides appear to have dif­ferent colors, he used hue to convey volume. Working like a mason, he built up his compositions using color and geometric form. While rigorously composed, his landscapes, still lifes, and imposing portraits manage to convey the fracturing nature of the painter’s gaze. He sometimes applied his pigment in short parallel strokes that align like iron filings to a magnet.

The year 1886 was a turning point in Cezanne’s life. He finally married Hortense Fiquet, who had become the mother of his son Paul in 1872. Six months later his father died, leaving him an immense fortune. Finally, Emile Zola published a novel, The Masterpiece, depicting Cezanne in an unflattering light, prompting the artist to end their long friendship.

In 1895, Cezanne had his first one- man exhibition in the gallery of the great dealer Ambroise Vollard. Allthough there were many bad reviews, his painter friends were enthusiastic. A handful of critics, too, had begun to understand his artistic aims, and expressed admiration for them.

Cezanne continued to live a with­drawn life in Aix-en-Provence, work­ing intensely in a new house and studio built to his specifications on the city’s outskirts. With dogged determination, he depicted a few themes over and over: still lifes of flowers and fruit, the nearby Mont Sainte-Victoire, portraits, and three large compositions of bathers. Painted slowly over a period of many months in a limited but rich palette, these last works feature massive female figures that seem to fuse with the surrounding landscape.

In the autumn of 1906, while painting in the environs of the city, the aged artist was caught in a sudden rainstorm; shortly after, he fell gravely ill and died.

A posthumous exhibition mounted at the Paris Salon d’Automne in 1907 marked the public acceptance of Cezanne’s greatness. His work had brought painting to the threshold of abstraction; his example proved cru­cial for the birth of Cubism, and in­deed for that of modern art as a whole.

In 1889, having won an Art scholarship, he traveled to Paris, where he almost immediately fell into a debilitating depression upon learning of the death of his father. It was during this dark period, however, that he discovered the work of Gauguin and the Impressionists.

After returning to Oslo, where an exhibition of his work attracted great attention, he was invited to exhibit his paintings in Berlin in 1892. There the uncompromisingly personal subject matter of his paintings so shocked the organizers of the exhibition that they shut it down after only a week. However, in this short time Munch’s work had deeply impressed a number of young German artists, and it was to exercise a strong influence on German Expres­sionism. Munch’s painting Evening on Karl-Johann Street shows the degree to which Munch had assimilated ~ the lessons of Impressionism and distanced himself from realist conventions. He reduced forms to areas of color, often dark and flatly applied, contained within sinuous outlines recalling the arabesques of the Art Nouveau style. The anguished emotional content of his paintings, however, could hardly be more distant from either Impression­ism or Art Nouveau. The Scream and Anguish particularly convey his tragic, almost desperate sense of life. In Paris, at the Salon des Independants of 1897, Munch exhibited his Dance of Life, a pessimistic vision of human destiny.

A difficult period of instability and depression began in 1898, during which the artist painted somber landscapes (Summer Night at the Seashore). With the onset of a serious psychological cri­sis, he entered a clinic. After his release he remained in Norway, where the Uni­versity of Oslo commissioned frescoes from him entitled The Mountain of Men.  These paintings mark his return to a more figurative art and a lighter palette.

In 1937 Munch took part in the In­ternational Exposition in Paris, at the very time when, in Germany, the Nazi government was seizing his canvases, which it considered examples of “degenerate” art. In his old age Munch pro­duced a series of self-portraits recording his unceasing exploration of his own destiny (Nocturnal Vagabond, 1939).

A precursor of Expressionisism Munch’s work greatly influenced that of a number of German artists, particularly Emil Nolde, Ludwig Kirchner, and Erich Heckel.

Article courtesy of ‘The beginners guide to Art’ , translated from the French by John Goodman, ediited by Brigitte Govignon.  The article was brought to you by Blue Horizon Printing ,experts in premium quality canvas prints.

Botticelli’s early paintings, such as his Fortitude and his St. Sebastian, were admired by the cultivated Medici family that had ruled Florence since the beginning of the century, and he soon became the favorite painter and friend of the head of the family, Lorenzo de’ Medici. Between 1478 and 1485, he painted Primavera (Spring) and The Birth of Venus, allegorical cel­ebrations of beauty inspired by an­cient mythology and the antique civi­lizations so highly admired by the Ital­ian humanists.

In 1481, Botticelli was summoned to Rome by Pope Sixtus IV to paint three frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, two scenes from the Life of Moses, and one from the Life of Christ. When the artist returned to Florence the following year his prestige had in­creased considerably, and he was now offered a great number of commis­sions. During this period he painted many exquisite Madonnas, which are among his best known works. He also produced a superb series of drawings illustrating the Divine Comedy, the great epic poem written by Dante in the previous century.

In 1492, Botticelli was much af­fected by the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Two years later Lorenzo’s son Piero de’ Medici was exiled from the city, which was now riven by religious and political tensions.

Article courtesy of ‘The beginners guide to Art’ , translated from the French by John Goodman, ediited by Brigitte Govignon.  The article was brought to you by Blue Horizon Printing, experts in quality canvas prints.

In 1861, he exhibited The Spanish Singer at the Salon, which won him his first success. In 1862 he exhibited Music in the Tuileries, which depicts the crowd at an outdoor concert, caught in a moment as if by the snap of a camera. To most critics and the public, this pic­ture seemed too casual for a serious painting, its sketchlike brushwork and seemingly random composition un­pleasantly chaotic.

The public’s annoyance became outrage the following year at the Salon des Refuses of 1863. This event had been organized, with the approval of the emperor Napoleon III, to exhibit paintings rejected by the official Acad­emy Salon. Manet presented Picnic on The Grass, a painting of two contem­porary French gentlemen in afternoon dress seated nonchalantly on the grass in a park, in the company of a com­pletely nude woman. What Manet had apparently thought of as an updating of the pastoral art of Giorgione and Titian was taken by many observers as a voyeuristic, even mildly pornographic, insult to serious art.

Reluctantly, Manet found himself a leader of a group of young artists who had broken with the official Art estab­lishment. Two years later his work be­came the focus of another controversy when he exhibited Olympia at the Salon. In this painting Manet dared to depict a nude woman, not in an antique setting but in contempo­rary surroundings, staring boldly out at the viewer without a shred of embar­rassment. As with Picnic on the Grass, public and critics were ill at ease with nudity presented without idealization, and they denounced the painting for its “vulgarity.”

Disappointed by the incomprehen­sion of public and critics, Manet left France for Spain, where he studied the works of Velazquez. In The Fifer, he achieved a synthesis of his Spanish models. Here the figure is set against a solid gray ground; the artist has refused all relief effects and half-tones, playing with the contrast between light and dark colors.

Excluded from the Universal Expo­sition of 1867, Manet erected a pavil­ion of his own opposite that of Courbet. The works he exhibited were harshly criticized, but they won the admiration of many younger artists. Despite the criticisms, Manet continued to try to exhibit at the official Salons, refusing to participate in independent exhibi­tions, including the first Impressionist one organized by Monet in 1874. Nev­ertheless, Manet and Monet became good friends, and Manet even spent his summers near Monet’s home at Argen- teuil. Indeed, Monet’s influence seems to have induced Manet to lighten his palette.

Manet devoted his last years to painting scenes in popular restaurants and cabarets. In 1879 he began his final masterpiece, the Bar at the Foties- Bergeres, exhibited at the Salon of 1882. This remarkably complex tour de force multiplies mirror reflections around the central figure of a barmaid, who remains aloof from the spectacle unfolding around her.

Article courtesy of ‘The beginners guide to Art’ , translated from the French by John Goodman, ediited by Brigitte Govignon.  The article was brought to you by Blue Horizon Printing, experts in quality canvas prints.

Encouraged by his brother Theo who was to be a constant source of support, both moral and financial  Vincent began to paint, producing such works as The Potato Eaters (1885), a canvas about which he remarked several years later: “I set out to convey the idea that these people who eat their potatoes in the lamp­light with their bare hands, worked the earth with these very hands, and that my painting exalts manual labor and the food that they themselves have so honestly earned.”

In 1885 he studied for a while in Antwerp, where he discovered the painting of Rubens, whose use of color he greatly admired. In Antwerp he also bought his first Japanese prints. A solitary man, the lack of available models prompted him to begin paint­ing his own likeness, and thus to begin his long series of self-portraits.

In 1886 he moved to Paris to live with his brother Theo, who was work­ing for the same art dealer who had earlier fired Vincent. There he discovered the Impressionists, and was much attracted to their light palette, free handling, and contemporary subject 4 matter. He also met Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Pissarro, and Signac. In The Italian Woman, Van Gogh brought Impressionist influence to bear on the lessons he had learned from Japanese prints, combining areas of unmodu­lated color with readily apparent brushstrokes.

In 1888 Vincent left Paris for Aries, where he hoped to find brighter light and more vivid color. He worked unceasingly, painting images of rural labor (The Sower), portraits of local personalities (The Postman), sunflowers, and three views of his modest bedroom. His work began to diverge from Impressionism as he adopted disorted spatial compositions and hues of exceptional intensity. A great admirer of Gauguin, he convinced the latter to join him in the south, where they worked together, often using the same models. Marie Gignoux, who posed for LArlesienne, also appears in Gauguin’s At the Cafe. But the two men, who were very different, often fought. Eventually they actually came to blows. After trying to wound Gau­guin, Van Gogh, distraught, cut off his own left ear. This is the disturbing episode behind the two versions of his arresting Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear( 1889).

Sensing that he was going mad, Van Gogh voluntarily committed himself to an asylum at Saint-Remy- de-Provence, where he tried to use his painting as a form of therapy. In the resulting landscapes (Poplars), portraits, and flower paintings (Irises), he applied green, mauve, yellow, and blue pigment in sinuous, discontinu­ous strokes.

In May 1890, Van Gogh settled in Auvers-sur-Oise in the house of Dr. Gachet, a friend of many artists, in­cluding Pissarro and Cezanne. There he simplified his compositions to achieve greater expressive focus, as in The Church in Auvers-sur-Oise. Tor­tured by the anguish reflected in his final canvases, in July of that same year he shot himself in the chest and died two days later, on July 29.

Little known during his lifetime, Van Gogh’s work greatly influenced both the Fauves and the Expressionists.

Article courtesy of ‘The beginners guide to Art’ , translated from the French by john Goodman, ediited by Brigitte Govignon.  The article was brought to you by Blue Horizon Printing, experts in quality canvas prints.

The effect of printing photos on canvas is stunning and gorgeous. Part time and professional photographers frequently employ the canvas print method to ensure the longevity of the photographs. These prints make up as ideal gifts for any occasion. A canvas art print converts an existing photograph into an artistic masterpiece.

Printing your wedding photos on canvas is an amazing idea. Wedding is a special occasion and the photos on canvas preserve the wedding memories to last a lifetime. You can even scan your previous photographs and put them as a collage of canvas print. This unique photo gift will bring in a smile on your spouses face and will add a new meaning to your relationship. Printing photos on canvas will make sure that you never forget your happy memories of the wedding.

The appeal of canvas print as a birthday present is amazing again. Also, if there is a newly born in the family, the canvas print will forever preserve the unforgettable happiness of the family. By printing photos on canvas the family will forever cherish the moment of birth of the newborn. Furthermore, as canvas prints can last for decades, it will be an amazing experience for the child to grow up and look what he or she was like when he or she was a child. The first time grandparents will also be forever looking at the face of their grandchild by the print on canvas.

The canvas print is also a great Christmas present. By printing the photos to canvas, the memories of an unforgettable Christmas will remain forever in the memory of the families.

Another way of bringing moments to life is by giving the canvas as a housewarming gift. The relevance of a canvas print as a housewarming gift is evident as the canvas is an amazing piece for interior decoration of the new house. You can print photographs taken by you or you can download an amazing picture from the net. Alternatively, you can add effects to the photographs taken by you in photo editing software like photoshop and then print the photo to canvas.

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Printing photos on canvas make up for ideal gifts for any occasion. Creating canvas prints is easy and it requires no retouching of the photographs ever.

Baroness Elisabeth Bachofen by Klimt

your room into a lively colorful experience. If you are an art aficionado, then you can display your artistic passion by printing copies of famous art pieces on canvas. These art pieces on canvas will show that you possess great taste is selecting art pieces and you regard your home as an artistic place. They are also quite a lot cheaper than buying an original despite looking fantastic!

A canvas art piece is a type of wall art where you print artistic creations on canvas. Since buying an original oil piece is an expensive option, it is a much more reasonable choice if you print a copy of the original piece on to a canvas. This will create a great canvas art to add value to your home. You can also paint a picture by yourself and transform it into canvas art. You will be surprised at how a simple painting can be converted it into a visually stunning work of art by simply adding effects by photo editing software like photoshop. A great number of visual effects can be added to create stunning pieces of art. Similarly, you can transform artworks of your children into canvas art and put up the pieces in your childs room. You will be surprised to see how this simple act will make everyone happy.

Manet - Port of Bordeaux

Printing photos on canvas is a simple way to create amazing wall art pieces. You can create pop art, digitally retouched arts or simple photographic art by the photographs that you have taken. You can even avail the service of professionals who can digitally convert your photographs into works of art and then convert them into a canvas print. Not only are such canvas prints great ideas of transferring your photographs into personal works of art, they are also great as gift items.

You can print your own photos to canvas and make your own canvas art. The photographs that you have taken on a family occasion can also be turned into artistic pieces. Whatever the occasion might be, the photographs can create stunning canvas art by simply printing the photos on canvas. You can add effects to your photographs by photo editing tools or you can even print the photos to canvas without adding effects. In either way, amazing pieces of canvas art can be created from simple photographs. Moreover, since the photographs have been taken by you, you can feel pure artistic delight in seeing your photographic vision being transferred to canvas art. These canvas art can be put on the walls for adding a photographic delight to your rooms.

A canvas art can also be put up on your workplace walls. By this, you can make your workplace an interesting place to work and motivate yourself to work. It has been indeed found out that a canvas art at a workplace is an extremely affordable investment and you can turn heads at the workplace by showing your artistic bent of mind.

At Blue Horizon Printing we offer a large range of art including many prints of famous works by such artists as Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Klimt, Manet, Franz marc, Childe Hassam and Morisot to name just a few. Visit our site today www.bluehorizonprinting.com.au