The Mona Lisa was painted on a wood panel and is in excellent condition four centuries later. Rigid art supports like panels and strainers protect your art from accidental damage caused by flexing and cracking of paint films or glue bonds, as well as protecting your work from being torn or otherwise damaged by mishandling and accidents. These art supports provide a firm surface ideal for painting, mixed media, mounting prints & works on paper, collage and as a rigid support for art fabrics.

We offer three types of rigid art supports:

Cradled Panels

Strainers

PVC Panels.

 

Cradled Panels

All of our cradled panels have 3-ply faces. The first two layers are mahogany, the top face is your choice of birch or mahogany.

Each birch face painting panel is spliced using the bookend match technique. Birch is considered to be a very seductive surface to paint on with it's very tight grain and swirly grain patterns.

Each mahogany face painting panel is from rotary cut, endless core wood, that means it's a continuous piece with no splices. Mahogany is an open grain, insect resistant wood, that provides a bit of texture to capture the paint.

Our standard cradled panel thicknesses are:
7/8",   1-7/8",   2-5/8"
Available in any dimension, tiny to huge!

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Click here for typical Cradled Panel pricing

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PN-P3-P4 panels Click on any image to ZOOM.

P3 backview	PN backview

panel with black sides (optional)	shellacked panel (optional)

Click on image to ZOOM.
Thin Artist Panel (7/8" deep)	Back of Small Panel

 

Strainers

This rigid art support is our most popular product due to its design as a 'wrap around' with our fine linen or cotton canvas fabric stretched around the sides and tacked in the back. As well as having strength and beauty, strainers allow the sides of the support to be painted. Thus, strainers don't need to be framed in order to exhibit them. (Although we do make floater frames for these.) Strainers' rigid joints are permanently glued and nailed, they do not come apart. Strainers are limited to UPS sizes, or we can deliver any size in the San Francisco Bay area, or they can be sent via truck freight.

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Click here for typical Strainer pricing

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Support Materials in Our Panels & Strainers

Some commercial art panels available in the market use plywood, or other scrap wood to cradle their panels. This is not moisture resistant, in the long run it won't stay straight. The whole idea is to stop the panel from warping, but plywood can cause warping. Plus it can make the piece extremely heavy. A few panel manufacturers use masonite, which is composed of sawdust and glue. Though inexpensive, the product is quite heavy, easily dog-eared, swells with moisture, cracks easily, and is impossible to repair.

Every John Annesley Company panel and strainer has a basswood support perimeter and bracing is included on larger supports. For hundreds of years basswood has been used in art supports. Basswood is softer than most hardwoods, which makes it easy to work with and easy to repair. In most of Canada & the US basswood has been depleted as a viable commercial product, but John Annesley Company's long-term relationships with suppliers has secured reliable sources.

 

PVC Panels - Exclusively from John Annesley Company

The cardboard and "hardboard" that is used as "Art Board" is a flimsy product for artists to work with. Way too easily they can warp and be destroyed. Here at John Annesley and Company we've come up with a superior product. A 4mm PVC panel where your choice from more than a dozen different fabrics is vacuum mounted and ready for permanence and convenience. The PVC panels don't absorb or react to moisture, and react only slightly to extremes of heat and cold. This product is so flat and smooth it's an enormous pleasure to us to be able to offer the art community this versatility.

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Click here for typical PVC Panel pricing

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Paper on PVC Panel - We also offer a line of Fabriano papers mounted on PVC Panels. Available is any size you'd like (up to 48") The standard 22" x 30" size with tradtitional white paper in the following finishes is priced: 300gms Smooth -$50.91 300gms Rough - $60.59 640gms Smooth - $60.81