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Serving the art community since 1889http://www.herbertevans.co.za or e-mail: [email protected]The best is to ‘size’ the panel with animal glue (preferably rabbit-
skin) or a high quality gelatine and then oil-primed. The best of the
oils for painting purposes was lead-oxide in linseed but now almost
impossible to buy here in SA so you could possibly use an Alkyd-
based Universal Undercoat. I find this preferable to an acrylic paint
used as a primer. Acrylic Emulsion is however far superior to PVA
and again I urge you not to use PVA as a primer. The idea is to isolate
your artists-paint from the support, be that a panel or canvas. The
masonite needs to be lightly sanded and the smooth side is generally
used and not the rough side!
If you can afford it and value your work, it would be best to buy an
artists gesso (pronounced jesso) which means gypsum in Italian. This
product is a pure acrylic emulsion with about 15% to 20% Calcium
Carbonate (marble dust) added. The balance is critical so if you add
a fistful of calcium carbonate to your tin of paint you will more likely
than not have much or in fact any success. Proper gesso (made
from animal glue and chalk) is far better than the acrylic version but
has largely fallen out of favour, because I assume it requires some
work, and in our ‘instant’ society, work is something that needs to be
avoided at all costs.
There are some that have become a ‘little’ confused about the ‘glue’
content when it comes to using a Gesso primer, and have mixed a cold
wood-glue with the acrylic emulsion. I’m not sure what they believe
will be achieved by this as all the commercial brands of wood-glue
are merely a variation of PVA. So theoretically it would be pretty much
the same as mixing PVA paint with your acrylic paint and doing no
more than weakening your acrylic primer. In reality nothing more than
a futile exercise, and I wonder who came up with this idea in the first
place and why it was so readily adopted?
Wood glue is fine for gluing your canvas to a panel, but then as I have
indicated, it needs to be properly primed so that the oil from your
artists paint does not leach through into the fabric. The linseed oil in
your paint is the thing that turns acid and will rot the fabric in time and
not the PVA glue or acrylic paint/primer. This is also a good reason
to use very pure artist’s quality raw linseed oil and not commercial
brands. The commercial brands contain a lot of impurities and even
water so are more prone to creating acid. The cold-glue would help to
stop anything from the panel reaching your painting for a while. It may
be a better idea to glue the canvas to the panel with pure acrylic paint.
It would last longer and be a better isolator in the long run.Artists such as the great British painter Edward Seago used panels
to paint on almost exclusively, and so too artists such as David Curtis
and Trevor Chamberlain. It has little or no effect on price or quality
and is accepted by dealers and people who know about these things.
Artists who use glazing in their work often prefer the panels to achieve
the effects they desire.First prize still goes to oil-primed Belgian linen and there is nothing
that comes even close to it as an artist’s support. Linen has long
smooth fibres that interlock readily. Cotton which is much weaker
(short irregular fibres) and is prone to rotting, is widely used now
for economical reasons, but may be replaced in the near future with
polyester, which is acid resistant and does not rot. It also pulls up
like a drum when stretched and does not sag as cotton does. The
polyester for art purposes must be UV stabilised!Panels and acrylic are fine if properly used. I hope this answers your
question dear reader!