Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Diary of a.... paint slut?


I am a paint slut.

I say this in the nicest possible way. While most painters are very very monogamous when it come to their materials, their pallets and their techniques I am not. I am an absolute raging paint slutty slutty slut-slut. I vacillate between single weave linen to heavyweight cotton duck, to clayboard, to rabbit-skin glue gesso primed medium-density fiberboard to PVA sealed birch hardboard to black-oil titanium primed linen affixed to high-denisty fiberboard with rabbit-skin glue. It's like the 1960's "free love" when it comes to choosing materials for a new painting except there is showering and deodorant involved (with me, not my materials).

Now, firstly, for anybody reading who doesn't know my work (how the hell did you end up here anyway?) I am primarily a miniature painter. That is to say very often my canvases lean toward the small size. For me, a full figure interior scene screams 8" x 10", 8" x 10"!! So very often this small work requires a real attention to the preparation of your support (canvas). as I've said above I though I would briefly run through some canvas I've recently used and give you the benefit of my morally questionable love affair with some of the many many types of painting surfaces:

Double weave 10 oz cotton duck:


Love it. It's real a workhorse canvas. I use it mainly on the canvases where I need the weight behind the brush. Because of the weight and the texture I rarely mount this to board. Generally speaking, I know some painters who prefer to paint on board (like my good friend Thomas Kitts. You can see his blog here; well worth the read) for the stability. Canvas affixed to board tends to have less of a problem with cracking than stretched paintings. Wanna know why? Because store bought canvas is, more often than not, improperly stretched. A good heavy weight canvas like cotton duck, if properly stretched, sized and primed is as archival as anything else. And when you start working bigger than, oh say, 14" x 18", mounting canvas on panel starts to become impractical.

Utrecht Double-Weave 9oz linen medium smooth texture:


The difference between this and cotton? Not a whole hell of a lot actually as far as painting texture goes. There are some who are uber-canvas snobs and who will paint on nothing but the finest belgian linen and those guys would love this stuff.

At this point, I feel it very important to stress that those guys are, simply put; Canvas Nazis. In the end it comes down entirely to personal preference which support you decide to use. I feel that one of the main differences between me and other painters is that I vary my support to take advantage of whatever subject I happen to painting.

In my opinion, the main advantage to linen lies with the finer weaves (which I'll get into in a moment). But those finer weaves become more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to working with larger canvases. Small brushes love a fine weave of linen and a rougher weave like two canvases above chew the hell out of them. If you are using a hog-hair or a similar synthetic why bother using a fine weave? They are too dumb a brush to notice. So why use a medium smooth weave 9 oz linen over a 10 oz double-weave cotton? The only advantage I can see lies in it's stretching.

Linen has less give than cotton does. In fact, dry unwashed linen will have almost no give at all when being stretched. While this does make stretching more difficult it does seem to allow you to keep the warp and weft (the lines you see in the weave) square to the stretcher edges. Who cares? Nobody really. That is until 250 years have gone by when the painting on the cotton canvas is cracking because the tension on the cotton thread is uneven due to improper alignment and stretching...

Michael Levine's lightweight unbleached clothes linen. Probably about 5oz.


Now this is interesting. I did experiment with a "apparel-grade" (I made that term up) clothes linen I bought downtown at Michael Levines (a sort of "fabric emporium" in the garment district of downtown Los Angeles.) You can readily see that the weave is far looser than an artist grade linen that is sold by Utrecht or Dick Blick. The verdict? Awesome for studies and at roughly 60% of the cost the price is certainly right. As to the archival quality, that I cannot vouch for. So I wouldn't go using it for the portrait commission you just received for the Duke of Edinburgh. Working out compositions? Yes.

Blick single-weave smooth "portrait grade" canvas 7oz.


For my miniature or highly detailed portrait work this is my go-to canvas. With a coat of PVA and maybe two coats of an acrylic gesso so that the canvas retains its toothy texture without impeding the flow of the paint of the brush.

The only drawback to this canvas is that it really is specialized. I attempted to use this once for a large still life 12" x 24". Man; worst. idea. ever. This is was before I started using the Kervin Mongoose Hair filberts , and as such I was using Chung-king hog's hair. Because the canvas has such a fine texture every single brush mark is visible. If you are a landscape painter this might be advantageous; especially if mounted on panel.

Utrecht Single weave 8.5 oz linen "66J" fine texture:


At the moment this is a new canvas for me. I picked some up yesterday for a tromp l'oeil I'm starting. From initial impressions I can say that there isn't too much difference I can see between this and Dick Blick portrait weave I have become so fond of. It is heavier, but only by 1.5 oz. The texture is only very minimally more pronounced than the 7oz portrait weave and I'm fairly certain you would be hard pressed to "touch-tell" the difference between this and the Blick. I have noticed however the tendency of the canvas to wrinkle which is giving me fits when attempting to apply it to a birch hardboard. To be fair however, I didn't watch the Blick linen before I used it which is not in itself a horrific faux pas. It just means that the starch wasn't fully removed (which adds an extra chemical in the cocktail. Albeit a relatively inert one)

As a final note. I nearly always buy unprimed canvas. It is sold primed which is awesome if you are lazy and don't care about having total control over the painting process. (I know, cheap shot right?) but I have experimented with primed canvas. Fredrick's makes a decent acrylic primed cotton canvas though it does have an oddly smooth texture. But really the main reason I do not buy primed canvas anymore is as follows:

Unknown brand (My guess is that it is produced by Satan in hell) Single weave linen canvas pre-primed with lead white. Probably about 5-7 oz. smooth texture.



Awful Awful stuff. I was given this canvas by another painter who had reached the same conclusion. It does not stretch well. In fact when I attempted to stretch it, the primer cracked.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?

It would not easily mount on board either; bubbling and peeling off the support all over the damn place. When I did manage to get it reasonably mounted painting was like wrestling a bear. When you take a close look at the surface, the application of the lead white ground is fairly uniform and you can just see the tips of the weave creating what looks like a textured surface. Lies. LIES. It's like painting on glass. Glass coated with Vaseline. Even my fine brushes (mongoose and/or sable) couldn't make a uniform stroke.

I asked a friend about it and he suggested I give it a coat of wax to help the paint adhere. I suggested he hand me a shovel so I can bury the fucking roll in my backyard. Never again.

Anybody interested in taking it off my hands? Please?

Well. That's enough of a foray into my probably low self-esteem induced trysts with various canvases. Later on there will be more info on mediums, paints, panels and projects than you can shake a pamphlet on material monogamy/abstinence at me and shout about how my grandmother would be ashamed of my behavior.

Genius out.

-F


2 comments:

  1. I may be married to a painter (you), but reading about canvases would not normally be my idea of a good time. However, this was smart, informative and a whole lot of fun! Keep the posts coming.

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  2. *settles into guilt induced depression over closet full of cheap canvases bought in bulk* ah well. I did learn a lot from your blog tho! Thanks :)

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