Canvas Maker

My dad has made and stretched many of my canvases in the 30+ years that I've been painting. Every once in a while a big project like this comes along and he needs to go into "super-sized" mode.

Here he is in the basement of the shop. This was back when the snow was still flying. He fired up the old pot-bellied stove you can see in the background, and went to work laminating poplar boards to create the sturdy stretcher frames for the canvases.

Here are a couple of photos of dad standing next to one of the larger lower canvases, showing the back side of the stretched canvas. The Prairie Winds artwork has four separate canvases–the top two canvases  in the piece are 48"x48" and the bottom two are each  48"x78". He also built into each canvas, a set of cleats which allowed for custom mounting these directly  and snug to the wall.

Dad has always been very creative and talented, especially when it comes to finding solutions to challenging projects that need to be built or fixed.

He was my first supporter and encourager to pursue my passion for art, encouraging me to draw and paint from my earliest memories of childhood.

Dad will be turning 77 on Thursday! If you'd like to post your greetings here, or send me an e-mail. I'll see that he gets them.