canvasful

plural canvasfuls

1. The contents of a canvas; the content of a painting on a canvas.

   She gave the painting, a vigorous canvasful of amorphous shapes in blues and blue greens, a moment's impartial inspection.

   1947, Robeson Bailey, Techniques in article-writing, page 122

   3 more examples

   When I see him at his easel, so neat and quiet, so unpretending and modest in himself, with such a composed expression on his attentive face, with such a weak white hand to guide such bold, big brushes, and when I look at the frightful canvasful of terrors which he is serenely aggravating in fierceness and intensity with every successive touch, I find it difficult to realize the connection between my brother and his work, though I see them before me not six inches apart.

   1890, Wilkie Collins, The Queen of Hearts

   How could one man's brush and hand, with his personal vision behind them, color a canvasful of sea and sky and human forms, and make of it but a decoration, beautiful, vibrant, shallow . . . while another's brush flung three heavy indignant-looking apples on a gray plate, with a napkin underneath, and behold, he had painted a deep and significant little corner of a majestic universe!

   1936, Cora Hardy Jarrett, Strange Houses, page 43

   On Martha's Vineyard, Summer 1962 is a canvasful of brushstrokes and scumblings, some wet into wet, some dry-brushed, with accidental runs of thinned paint allowed to remain.

   2003, Frank Jewett Mather, Frederic Fairchild Sherman, Art in America - Volume 91, page 121