INDEX: Canvas Display Outfitting Fixtures

INDEX:
Canvas Display Outfitting Fixtures

Canvas Retail Display Outfitting

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This Canvas Display Outfitting Fixtures index page aggregates links
to all posts and photos of retail merchandising, display, and outfitting
as well as deep Background courtesy of Wikipedia.

BACKSTORY: Canvas is an extremely durable plain-woven fabric used for making sails, tents, marquees, backpacks, shelters, as a support for oil paintingand for other items for which sturdiness is required, as well as in such fashion objects as handbags, electronic device cases, and shoes. It is popularly used by artists as a painting surface, typically stretched across a wooden frame.

Modern canvas is usually made of cotton or linen, or sometimes polyvinyl chloride (PVC), although historically it was made from hemp. It differs from other heavy cotton fabrics, such as denim, in being plain weave rather than twill weave. Canvas comes in two basic types: plain and duck. The threads in duck canvas are more tightly woven. The term duck comes from the Dutch word for cloth, doek. In the United States, canvas is classified in two ways: by weight (ounces per square yard) and by a graded number system. The numbers run in reverse of the weight so a number 10 canvas is lighter than number 4.

The word “canvas” is derived from the 13th century Anglo-Frenchcanevaz and the Old French canevas. Both may be derivatives of the Vulgar Latin cannapaceus for “made of hemp“, originating from the Greek κάνναβις (cannabis).^[2]^[3]

Canvas is a popular base fabric for embroidery such as cross-stitch and Berlin wool work.^[9] Some specific types of embroidery canvases are Aida cloth (also called Java canvas^[10]), Penelope canvas, Chess canvas, and Binca canvas.^[11]^[12]^[13] Plastic canvas is a stiffer form of Binca canvas.^[14]

From the 13th century onwards, canvas was used as a covering layer on pavise shields. The canvas was applied to the wooden surface of the pavise, covered with multiple layers of gesso and often richly painted in tempera technique. Finally, the surface was sealed with a transparent varnish. While the gessoed canvas was a perfect painting surface, the primary purpose of the canvas application may have been the strengthening of the wooden shield corpus in a manner similar to modern glass-reinforced plastic.

Splined canvases differ from traditional side-stapled canvas in that canvas is attached with a spline at the rear of the frame. This allows the artist to incorporate painted edges into the artwork itself without staples at the sides, and the artwork can be displayed without a frame. Splined canvas can be restretched by adjusting the spline.

Stapled canvases stay stretched tighter over a longer period of time, but are more difficult to re-stretch when the need arises.

Canvas boards are made of canvas stretched over and glued to a cardboard backing, and sealed on the backside. The canvas is typically linen primed for a certain type of paint. They are primarily used by artists for quick studies.

Understanding the mechanical properties of art canvases is necessary for art conservation, especially when deciding on transporting paintings, conservation treatments and environmental specifications inside museums.^[15] Canvases are layered structures made from weaving fibers together, where each layer responds differently to changes in humidity, resulting in localized stresses that cause deformation, cracking, and delamination.^[15] There are two directions to the canvas: the warp direction (threads run vertically) and the weft direction (threads run horizontally). Researchers performed tensile testing to determine the effects of humidity on the strength of canvases and observed that increasing humidity decreased the effective elastic modulus (combined modulus of the weft and warp directions). For example, the effective modulus at 30% relative humidity is 180 MPa, which drops to 13 MPa at 90% relative humidity, suggesting that canvas is becoming more flexible and susceptible to deformation.^[15]There is an inherent anisotropy to the elastic modulus measured in the weft and warp direction as evidenced in the strain vs. load behavior of the canvas. The canvas exhibits a 0.1 strain in the weft direction and 0.2 strain in the warp direction before failing (thread ripping apart).^[15] Though, tensile testing provides an explicit measure of material strength, conservationists are unable to tare a piece of painting to create the samples (required length of 250 mm), therefore the traditional methods of assessing mechanical properties have been visual cues and pH values.^[16]

Art conservationists have recently adopted a new method called zero-span strength analysis, nanoindentation, and numerical modelling to quantitatively evaluate the mechanical properties of painting canvases.^[16]^[17]^[18] Zero-span strength analysis measures the tensile strength of materials, such as paper and yarns, by reducing the clamping distance to 0.1 mm and applying load to a particular point on the yarn.^[16]^[19] This minimizes effects from material geometry and accurately assesses intrinsic fiber strength. This also reduces the amount of material needed for samples to 60 mm.^[16] Using zero-span strength analysis, conservationists measured tensile strength of flax, commonly used canvas material in historical paintings and correlated tensile strength to the degree of cellulose depolymerization — cellulose is a component of flax.^[16] Another method for assessing canvas quality is nanoindentation utilizing a millimeter-sized cantilever with a microsphere at its end and measuring local viscoelastic properties.^[18]However, with the nanoindentation method, conservationists can probe the composite behavior of the layers of paint on top of the canvas, not the actual strength of the canvas itself. Lastly, conservationists are using finite element modeling (FEM) and extended-FEM (XFEM) on canvases undergoing desiccation (removal of moisture) to visualize the global and local stresses.^[17] (SOURCE: Wikipedia)