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Canvas prints--the end of the road?

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Mats Winther

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Chinese artists copy famous painters and sell cheaply. They claim that they are 100% hand-painted, but I don't believe that. I suppose these are really canvas prints which have been painted on, because it takes too much time to paint from scratch. Picasso Matisse The question is if these canvas-print-paintings will take a big share of the market, to the detriment of local artists. Perhaps the bohemian artist will find it hard to make a living in the future. M. Winther.
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Alan Green

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It does seem strange that buyers would pay for a painted fake when they can get quality prints taken from huge numbers of genuine paintings for sensible money.

Pat Harrison

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Having seen videos of how they do it I should imagine they are really hand painted. I should think they work on an assembly line with each worker (painter) only doing part of the painting. The average assembly worker in Shenzhen now makes $328 per month or $2 per hour. So if they can produce just one painting a day it still gives them a profit at $30 per painting. You cannot compete with that. That is why all our factories are moving eastwards until the bosses find out that without jobs we cannot buy their good any more.
With Sarah, Phil, Ellen, Rose the dentist, and the granddaughter whose name I forget.

Robert Jones, Napa

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I've seen these sites, and have even been approached by one company which asked me if I would be interested in, basically, knocking off a quantity of copied paintings for them - I don't know how that would even have worked, but obviously I wasn't interested, not being a machine.... The Chinese artists are highly skilled, well educated, and produce crude, brash dross - inevitably, they couldn't possibly do anything else at the speed they work. But, if you want a facsimile of an old master, they can do it for you: it will quite obviously be a fake, and the more they veer towards the figurative the more obvious that's likely to be - not because figurative is better than abstract, but by reason of the techniques that were involved in painting the originals: you can only begin to fake that (um .... I'm not trying to coach forgers here....) if you use the same methods and much the same materials. i wouldn't be at all confident that these "masterpieces" won't crack and craze to buggery in the course of time, but then provided they don't actually fall off the canvas that might enhance their appeal. They're cheap, of course, that's why they sell: you get a lot of painting for your money: we won't sell our stuff below a certain price, because it's not worth it for us as individuals and it devalues our market -
With Sarah, Phil, Ellen, Rose the dentist, and the granddaughter whose name I forget.

Robert Jones, Napa

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And the rest of that reply has disappeared into the ether, because the blankety-blank site is playing up again..... But you get the point. It's the difference between a tailor-made suit, and George at Asda.

Mats Winther

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So they are trying to recruit European painters for this forgery business. It must be good business, then. But I thought it was illegal to copy paintings and signatures, like this one, here. /Mats