Photo Art Classics hits Chester

Nestled in the midst of its delicatessens, hair salons, and antique stores stands Historic Downtown Chester's newest entrepreneurships: Photo Art Classics. Located on Main Street in Chester, this quaint store, with deep green walls and large glass windows that twinkle with small white lights and showcase embroidered pillows and antique furniture, invites the imaginative and nostalgic soul to enter and discover what is so unique and "classic" inside its walls. "Everyone has a picture they love. A picture they want to do something special with," says Margaret Bennett, Goshen resident and owner and operator of the store, explained. And Photo Art Classics provides the perfect opportunity to preserve and beautify memories. And as one proceeds up the stairs and enters, one is greeted with, just as the store's name advertises: pictures. Wedding pictures, vacation pictures, family pictures, pet pictures—all four walls are covered in photographic memories that have a little something special about them: they've been turned into canvas prints resembling oil or watercolor pieces of artwork. "Everyone has a picture they love. A picture they want to do something special with," says Margaret Bennett, Goshen resident and owner and operator of the store, explained. And Photo Art Classics provides the perfect opportunity to preserve and beautify memories. Bennett uses a process called Giclee, which is French for "spurt," and was invented in the early 1980's by, in part, Graham Nash, who in addition to his musical career in Crosby Stills and Nash, was also an avid photographer. Giclee is a new method for creating art prints by scanning a picture and, using a special ink jet printer, transforming the photo into a piece of artwork by spurting ink (as many as one million drops per second) onto a canvas. Giclee prints are remarkable for their deep, intense coloring as well as for their exact detail. Her canvases are both water and crack resistant and use ink that is guaranteed for 75 years. Giclee prints are said to last as many as 70 years, before deterioration. Bennett, who does all her reproducing at the store itself, is able to make a print of up to 40" in width. She also stretches and mounts each canvas on any one of her many all-wood frames. The technology can also make corrections on a photograph's coloring, aging (yellowing), cracks, and marks caused by dust or scratching. Pictures can be enlarged or reduced and backgrounds can be altered in order to remove less desirable elements, such as wires, trees, appliances—"anything, really." The only instance where she would not be able to reproduce a photo is in the case of copyright infringement. "My original focus for my business was a gift store, but these canvas transfers are such an important part," Bennett admitted. She now feels comfortable calling her store a "reproduction gallery." She specializes in reproductions of furniture and statues from the gilded era, and is very focused on providing her customers with competitive and fair pricing. "I want people to know they're getting a value," she said. Bennett comes from a retail background and worked in the business for over ten years. She's always wanted her own business and began to seriously think about starting it a few years ago. She admits to always having had a "good eye for sales" and is excited about her new position as a buyer. "Mine is a business where people meet who're they're doing business with. I want to people to have 100% satisfaction. I don't want them to leave until they're completely satisfied with the product," said Bennett. And her stop's main attraction? It's unique-ness, insists its owner. "There's nothing else like this around here," she says, glancing around her store.