Shaped canvas

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Shaped canvas paintings are done on canvas in a shape other than the traditional, flat rectangle. This may be more traditionally done by creating a different edge form and retaining a flat painting surface, as in a rondo made on a circular stretcher or panel, or less traditionally by moving the surface by stuffing or padding the surface, or stretching the canvas across a shaped stretcher. More rarely, shaped holes or apertures may be cut in the canvas, changing the actual topology of the surface. Such alterations result in work that sits at the tide mark between painting and sculpture.

According to thehistorymakers.com, abstract painter Edward Clark of New Orleans is the first painter credited with working on a shaped canvas. [1]

Representational modes often require realist paintings to be like a flat window pane. The neutral form of a flat rectangular canvas is an assumption in painting which is challenged by the shaped canvas. The argument is that all paintings have a thickness which prevents them being truly flat.

Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, Ronald Davis, Neil Williams, David Novros, Al Loving, and Jack Reilly are examples of artists who used shaped canvas forms from the 1960s on. Geometric abstract artists, minimalists, and Hard-edge painters may, for example, elect to use the edges of the image to define the shape of the painting rather than accepting the rectangular format.

The apertured, superimposed, multiple canvases of Jane Frank are a special case: while generally flat and rectangular, they are rendered sculptural by the presence of large, irregularly shaped holes in the forward canvas or canvases, through which one or more additional painted canvases can be seen.