Original Painting or Signed & Numbered Print — How to Choose
Some version of this question comes up almost every time a painting sells before someone gets to it, or the original they've fallen for is priced above where they'd hoped to land: should you hold out for an original, or is a print the better call? I touch on this briefly in how to choose a painting for your home too, but it deserves the fuller answer.
What an original actually carries
An original is the only one of its kind that will ever exist. Mine are latex-acrylic on canvas, blocked in first with wide flat strokes, then built up in layers heavy enough that each pass leaves a ridge you can see in raking light — you can trace a brushstroke with your eye, sometimes with a fingertip. A print reproduces the colour and the composition faithfully; it can't reproduce the paint itself. I live and paint here in Calgary, and a piece like Moraine Lake Mist — morning mist over the lake, the turquoise water gone soft and silver while the peaks fade in and out of cloud — is exactly the kind of quiet moment that only really exists once, on one canvas.
What a signed & numbered print gives you instead
Selected paintings are also available as archival pigment giclée prints — on fine-art paper, or as canvas editions of 95, each one hand-signed and numbered. They're printed locally, and once an edition of 95 is gone, it's gone, the same as an original. A print won't carry the raised paint texture, but it costs less to own, and it's the only way to bring home a painting that's already found its collector. Because every painting has its own proportions, there's no single order form for this — each painting's own page in the store carries its own print quote request, sized to that piece's true ratio. Tell me which one you love and I'll take it from there.
So which is right for you
If the object itself is the point — the one-of-a-kind canvas, the texture, knowing no one else will ever own that exact piece — buy the original while it's still here. If the image matters more than the object, or the original's already sold, a signed and numbered print keeps it within reach. And if neither quite fits — a specific wall, a specific place, a specific story — a commission starts with nothing more than a photo and that story.
Two originals still here
Right now that includes Moraine Lake Mist (18×24 in, CA$1,296) and Lake Louise Flock (20×20 in, CA$1,200) — both one of a kind, both still in the studio. Others, like the first Moraine Lake painting, have already found their collectors; a print is how that particular view stays available to everyone else. Browse the rest in the store, or read the full print and commission details on the info page before you decide. — Martin