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A Hybrid Question
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Message
Posted
There's a Facebook post - I read these so you don't have to! - from an oil painter who wants to remove "plastic" from his painting practice; by which he means acrylic. He's asking what the alternatives are for priming canvas; knowing that the old masters and others before the advent of acrylics used a variety of primers and sealants, usually incorporating rabbit-skin glue. Other glues and distempers were used, as was genuine gesso (which acrylic is not).
I understand his point - micro-plastics in the seas, in our food, in our brains; no one wants to encourage their proliferation. At the same time - plastic is everywhere: if you wear any polyester, you're wearing plastic - or at least plastic was involved in its creation. Your car, your house, your phone, your light-fittings, your shoes (don't buy plastic shoes! Just don't!), the packaging of your food, the bag you carry your shopping home in, the cabling on your power leads, quite probably your specs and hearing aid - all use plastics.
Acrylic paint however is not plastic - the pigments are the same as those you use in watercolour, oil, gouache and tempera: it's the binding that's plastic - acrylic paint is ordinary pigment in a plastic resin; acrylic varnish is likely to be the same resin or a variant on it. Rabbit-skin glue has no plastic in it, but has many other disadvantages - it can be difficult to prepare, it can expand and contract, it can stink, it can crack: and to prove it, it does all of those things, which isn't to say it's not fit for use if you're well equipped to apply it.
Fear of plastic pollution is not a good reason to steer clear of acrylic priming, and isn't really a reason to avoid acrylic paint either, because the contribution artists make to plastic pollution is vanishingly minimal; and acrylic priming is, for now at least, one of the safest primings you can use, allowing one product to both seal a surface and provide a good support for oil, and obviously acrylic, painting. There IS an issue with plastic; there is an issue with lead, which is one of the alternative primers, if you can get it. Maybe one day we'll find an alternative which is perfect - presents no risks, won't delaminate or crack. For the time being though - unless you've found a surface which won't rot on contact with oil (which is why priming is necessary) acrylic is still your best bet.
And if I've answered a question you never thought of asking, and have made you wonder if there really IS a problem - whoops, sorry...
Posted
One of my favourite artists is Edward Seago. He prepared his boards with several coats of rabbit skin glue (rsg), mixed with white lead, which was stirred into the heated rsg…
Caution: Don’t try this at home!
You can now buy prepared rsg in a sort of granulated form, but you can’t get the white lead, so it’s now impossible to emulate his ground… well it is for us, but a conservationist would have access to white lead no doubt!
Yes, dangerous if handled incorrectly.
One of Robert’s favourite subjects… I’m sure he’ll be able to elaborate more about this as it comes in many guises…and up until fairly recently, both of us were using it instead of Titanium White.
This gave him a high degree of absorbency and enabled his layers of paint to dry more quickly, and left those gorgeous trademark Seago brushstrokes on the surface.
Note that he rarely used stretched canvases, but more stable boards, so no issues with this mixture becoming unstable due to flexing etc.
I wrote a feature on Edward Seago a while ago for The Artist, I did mix up some of my own home-made gesso style ground, fabulous to work on… here are a couple of my examples - not quite a Seago, but I gave it my best shot!
And of course a nautical scene…
And of course a nautical scene…
Edited
by Alan Bickley
Posted
Robert, sorry to bother you on this forum post but the portrait forum thread is no longer available to me and have tried multiple times. The post that should never have been deleted was mine ... seems like the system has barred me from entering this thread again. Who should I talk to to get this resolved? Many thanks. Heather
Posted
[email protected]
They should sort things out for you!
Posted
Back to Alan's paintings, which got all lorst and gorn in the spam - they're wonderful, and very reminiscent of Seago; the priming is important; these days, I use the surface as it comes - which is sometimes a mistake - or apply more acrylic priming over it; I haven't used white lead, but only because I couldn't get it, in a long time. I wish it were readily available, but it's faff enough to get hold of a tube of lead white paint, and now extremely expensive. I didn't use it with rabbit skin glue - I've never used that... either I didn't like the sound of it, or didn't trust it, or was too lazy to bother with it; probably all three. It can still be got - in the form Alan describes; he will know better than I do whether there's a point to using it with the whites we have generally available. I wouldn't have thought there was any real point in using it with acrylic ... but that's something to look into.
The ACF canvases I've been using don't need - in my opinion - any further priming: though be it said I like a fairly smooth surface; and Ampersand boards have an extremely interesting-to-paint-on coating, VERY smooth but with a grip; plus there are now aluminium panels, which I've never tried. We can't say there's any lack of choice.
Posted
I’ve used the ACF canvases as they come, I’ve not found it necessary to add more gesso. Ive just posted my fourth oil on an ACF canvas, so judge for yourself.
The two Seago examples were all part of a feature in TA, Learning from Seago… so I wanted to get as close to his preparation methods as possible.
It actually makes a wonderful ground to work on. I may seriously think about adopting his method again at some point… it’s all in the preparation, as they say…,whoever ‘they’ are
Edited
by Alan Bickley