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About the Pit Bull Wrap Stretcher
The Pit Bull Wrap Stretcher™ is the brainchild of two longtime professionals in the art industry. As the owner of Art’s Canvas, Art Feldman has been one of the leading suppliers of stretched canvas and stretcher bars on the West Coast for over 40 years. Marty Gray is an internationally-collected landscape painter and has been one of Art’s clients for the past two decades. Marty has been producing his own canvas giclées in his studio for the past decade.
Ever the innovator, Art has designed a number of the machines in his shop which have made him a leader in the industry. One of the machines that Art invented was for stretching canvas. Marty, in addition to his art career, had also spent many years as a tool and die maker, providing stamping dies to the precision sheet metal industry. One of the changes they both noticed over the past several years was the fact that now most clients wanted gallery wraps. This included not only giclée prints but also stretched canvas on which to paint. Gallery wraps offer the artist and publisher the opportunity to sell their product without any framing, and many clients like the look and the price. The problem had been how to make gallery wrap stretching easy and profitable, which Art had solved many years earlier by creating a hand-held version of his stretching machine that would create gallery wraps. He has been using this tool for over 30 years during which time his company had stretched many millions of canvases.
Marty, on the other hand, had spent many hours in his studio working on modifying the type of stretching pliers available from art stores that would allow him to gallery wrap his giclées. Finally, he came up with a version that greatly sped up the process while minimizing the effort required.
One day, in the course of a conversation about stretching gallery wraps, Art invited Marty up to his shop to see the tool he had devised. Marty quickly realized that they could combine their two ideas and make an amazing wrapping tool. The seed had been planted for the Pit Bull. Marty prototyped their idea at his machine shop until everything worked the way they had envisioned. Now, Art and Marty share the technology that makes gallery wrapping with a hand tool simple, easy and affordable. With The Pit Bull Wrap Stretcher™ virtually anyone can create beautiful tight gallery wraps without the need for a large, cumbersome, and expensive machine.
Why the name? Once, when they were talking about the merits of the tool they had created, Art said “It’s just like a pit bull—once it grabs on it won’t let go.” Marty smiled and said, “That’s it….that’s what we’ll call it!”
Patent Number: 8,495,828
© 2014 Grayfeld, Inc.
