Surfaces

I’ve been experimenting with different painting surfaces lately, so I decided to do a bit of reading on them. I’ll try to summarize some of what I learned in that research, and also share my own thoughts on the surfaces I’ve experimented with.

Let’s start with oil painting in general. The origins of painting in oils are a little hazy and somewhat complicated. There are Buddhist murals dating back to the 7th century that were done on stone walls and apparently contain oil. There are references in Europe from the 12th century for using oil to make paint but the usage is unclear, and it never took off for common use. So, we generally credit Jan Van Eyck in the 15th century with the origin of painting in oils — at least as a general purpose medium for creating art.

Prior to this, historical art (at least in the west) was primarily done in tempera or fresco. Since fresco is painting into wet plaster, there’s not a lot of choice as to what surface you can use. Tempera is not flexible when dry, so choices were still limited to rigid surfaces in theory (but if you look around on the internet now, you’ll find tempera works on canvas, paper, vellum, pretty much anything). Historically though, master works in tempera were likely done on rigid panels or walls.

Oil is flexible when dry and can be painted on almost anything. Of course, most surfaces need to be treated before they can be used to paint on or the oil based suspension medium will damage the surface. This is called “sizing” (etymology of this term is unclear), and it’s usually some sort of glue — historically made from animal skin. Applying a size protects the surface from damage, but it may not be pleasant to paint directly onto glue. For wood panels, the glue would be mixed with some sort of plaster or gypsum or marble dust, and possibly a whitener. This is what used to be called “gesso” and was only used on rigid surfaces such as wood panels. (Note: modern “gesso” is typically just acrylic primer.) Since gesso itself is rigid and cannot be applied to a flexible surface like canvas, when a canvas is sized it is commonly also primed with a base layer of paint. Historically this would have been an oil base with a whitener — likely lead. Modern primers for artists are often made with alkyd resin and titanium.

Other historical surfaces include copper and canvas. Canvas became popular in Venice due to availability of sail cloth, but is also the most reasonable surface for really large paintings. Even murals on walls are subject to changes in the surface of a wall but canvas is flexible so the flexible oil based suspension medium is well suited for it. Canvas is also light compared to other surfaces making it easier to transport.

Modern surfaces include all of the historical surfaces listed above (including paper and vellum) and add newer surfaces like aluminum, MDF, canvas boards, nylon, and probably others. People fall in love with a particular surface for its unique characteristics, whatever they are. People who paint on copper love the luminous quality it has, wood panels can be ultra smooth, etc. Finding a surface that works for me was going to be a bit of an experiment, but would never include every option. So I narrowed things down a bit with the research I did. Metal surfaces suffer from ionization which weakens the paint film, and are expensive and way too smooth for me. So, metal supports are out.

I tried paper, but it needs to be stretched on another support and it has a very “thirsty” surface. I didn’t like it. I tried boards in the past, and again recently. There are different “tooths” available in pre-primed panels. I tried the ultra smooth tooth, and it was horrible for me. I tried a heavy tooth, and it was way too rough (lots of little bumps with light and shadow all over the place). I then tried medium tooth (probably should have started there) which felt OK, and I thought it would work out but was still inferior to canvas, from my perspective. The benefit of using panel boards is that they are thin and are easy to carry in wet carriers for traveling with a painting after it’s done (plein air painting or workshops, etc.). Since I rarely need to carry wet paintings around, this isn’t a big issue for me right now. If a get into plein air, it may be something I need to think about, but even then, I’d rather figure out a way to carry around wet stretched canvas than to switch back to using panels.

So, I’m back to using canvas. In terms of what type of canvas, I prefer fine linen. I’ve used cotton (and still have some raw blankets around, so I’ll keep using it until it’s gone), but fine linen has the best tooth, stays out of my way, and just works for me. I don’t ever feel like I’m fighting with the surface when I paint on linen. I was definitely fighting the panels and the paper. I often use pre-stretched canvasses, mostly because I have so little time to work in the studio. I’d rather spend that time just painting instead of stretching and prepping surfaces. Although when I do prepare a surface myself, I really enjoy the process and feel a kind of connection to the surface in a way that doesn’t happen with pre-stretched canvas.

Maybe I’ll revisit this sometime, but for now I’ll keep painting on canvas. In the future, maybe I’ll spend some time in a future post on pre-stretched vs. home stretched.