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Acrylic, Gouache, box canvas, stretch canvas and lots more???
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Message
Posted
Many people paint the sides of their canvases - it's not a sin, and it won't necessarily stand in the way of sales, either. My only point is that if you go to a professional exhibition of paintings, a) the pictures will normally be framed, and b) even if they aren't, very few will be on box canvases. But you don't have to paint like a professional - whatever that is, incidentally - if you don't want to. As will be clear, I really (really!) don't like the practice at all - I think it's a fashion that could do with meeting a sticky end. But so what? It's not a technical issue, but a matter of taste. Even so, it does depend a lot on where you want your stuff to be seen, and in what company. Just as I think it's a bad idea - on purely commercial terms, not snobbish ones - to put accomplished work in amateur exhibitions (and 'professional' and 'amateur' remain words which carry way too much weight) I also think that nothing says 'this may not be art, think of it as décor' quite so much as a bright acrylic painting wandering over the sides of a canvas. A serious collector - at whom one needs to aim if one's ever to make a living at this lark - is very unlikely to look at a painting finished in this way. Though not everyone who buys a painting is necessarily a serious collector. So, it's completely up to you - it's about the way you tailor and present a product, and whom you're hoping to interest in it.
(I use gallery canvases, by the way, in very small sizes, for little oil studies I can just finish and stand up on table-tops, shelves, piles of books, anywhere - I don't paint the sides - that'd be a bit of a pain in oil anyway - and if a painting is intended to go up on a wall, it invariably needs a frame, not a canvas that stands inches proud of it.)
Canvas boards, yes, are fine, but go for a heavy duty one, such as Winsor and Newton or Loxley make: those that warp if you so much as look at them are just a nuisance.
Posted
I am in the middle of a seascape on a box canvas. I have continued the image around the sides and the top and bottom. I could probably have left the top as no one will see it when hung on the wall but I did it for the sake of completeness. My main concern is how to cope with those top and bottom edges which are resting on the easel. If I leave them until the sides are completely dry and turn it through 90 degrees, I may not be able to match the colours already used and if I mix enough to save for when I can get at the currently unpainted parts, the paint may have gone off!
How does everyone else cope with this issue (other than not painting the top and bottom?
Edited
by Trevor Johnson
Posted
Continuing a painting around the edges really does look out of place, I can’t see any point in it whatsoever, mask it off before you start and then peel the tape off.
Result - pristine white edges to your painting, which looks right and is how they are displayed in the top galleries, assuming they’ve not been framed of course.
It’s how David Hockney and all professional artists present their work,
Edited
by Alan Bickley
Posted
I must admit that I prefer boards these days also.
I’m working on some Jackson’s Handmade Linen boards which they sent me for this oil test report I’m doing for TA, I must say that they are really superb with a lovely fine texture.
They’re on MDF so obviously rigid, not cheap to buy but I’m converted!
Posted
I’m with you Alan as a fan of Jackson’s linen covered boards. I discovered them when I needed an odd size for a small pochade box which I was given, and have used them since then. They are lovely to use and very different to a basic board.
Re the box canvases which I’ve never used, for painting the edges, if struggling with top and bottom, can you not lay the canvas on a sheet or newspaper to complete the edges?
Posted
Trevor - what paint are you using? What you propose would be a problem with oil, but with acrylic, as it dries so fast, IF I were going to do this I'd take the canvas off the easel, lay it flat, and use the same mix of paint as I'd used for the 'face' of the painting, as it were. You can keep the paint moist and workable if you use a stay-wet palette, so the paint shouldn't go off, i.e. shift in tone, or dry out.
As you know, I wouldn't do it - but that's neither here nor there, t'ain't my painting.
Actually, oil wouldn't really be much of a problem either - you could finish your painting and do the sides at your convenience, by just mixing a new batch of the same paint you used for the main work. How you'd pick it up, mind, I leave to you - leaving it drying out on, say, a sheet of newsprint would probably cause it to adhere round the edges: you could suspend the canvas, e.g. rest it on something at the corners so that the sides weren't in contact with anything; but it'd be a fiddly job (and yet another reason why I wouldn't do it).
STOP PRESS - Missed your reply on your choice of paint, apologies. You use oil - well: sooner you than me then, if painting the sides as a continuation of the main painting.
Edited
by Robert Jones, NAPA