Welcome to Maxim Art Studios

Maxim Art Studios is devoted to bringing you color and creativity through art. Currently our collection includes original oil paintings and limited edition giclées (see below for definitions). Please check back often as we will be expanding our offerings to include pottery, photography, sculpture and drawings. Maxim Art Studios is available exclusively online. We hope you enjoy the artwork as much as we do.

Maxim Art Studios offers wholesale pricing and quantity discounts, along with discounts for interior designers. Please contact us for more information.

Art Definitions

Original Artwork - Artwork which has been originated by the artist in person or artwork which has been finished or embellished by the original artist.

Giclée - Commonly pronounced "zhee-clay," is an invented term for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée", from the French language word "gicleur" meaning "nozzle", was created by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The term, originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print.

Giclée prints can be printed on a number of different media -- watercolors can be reproduced on watercolor paper, for instance, and can be so color-true that they are virtually indistinguishable from the original. Oil paintings can be reproduced on canvas. Because there is no 'plate' as in standard printing processes, the artwork can be scaled up or down in size, limited only by the physical limitations of the giclée printing machinery. Artists have flocked to giclée printing as a method for making their art available to a wider audience. The ability to create different sizes of giclée prints, and to print on different media, allows artists to experiment to find the size and medium most popular with the art-buying public.

Lithograph - Prior to the advent of giclée printing, the standard method of reproducing art was lithography. Lithography is a method for printing on a smooth surface. It can be used to print text or artwork onto paper or another suitable material. Because this process requires the creation of a printing plate, made by scanning and color-separating the art, lithography is a fairly expensive process. The bulk of the cost is in set-up, so to make affordable prints, large numbers are required to amortize the cost over a greater quantity. Hence, lithographs are usually made in runs of at least 500-1000.