A plea to use traditional
materials and practices in painting, whenever you can.
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American Landscape with Indian Camp, by Ralph Blakelock, showing the damage that can result from
tinkering with technique.
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Yesterday I mentioned the deterioration in Albert Pinkham
Ryder’s paintings. He was not, by any means, the only painter whose work has
suffered over time.
Prior to the 19th century, painters had a limited range of
materials at their disposal: vegetable oils, waxes, plant gums and resins, and
eggs, milk, and animal hides. Pigments were made by either grinding minerals or
extracting dyes from plants and insects. Some of the extracted pigments
turned out to be fugitive (meaning they aren’t light-fast) but generally those
old paintings are in remarkably good condition.
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Holy Virgin Mary by
Chris Ofili. Now, seriously, how does a conservator preserve elephant dung
stuck to a canvas?
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The 19th and 20th centuries were a period of constant
modification of materials. Some changes have been inarguably for the better—for
example, there would have been no Impressionism had there not been an explosion
of new pigments in the mid-19th century.
Whenever I visit the modern collection at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery I am
struck anew by how badly some of their paintings have aged. 20th century
artists had no reason not to use the tremendous variety of synthetic materials
that industry was creating—synthetic media, plastics, adhesives, and drying
agents. As the definition of what constituted painting broke down, artists also
incorporated materials the ancients would have understood to be ephemeral or beneath
their calling: dung, straw, paper, urine, blood, etc.
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Woman, by Willem
de Kooning, 1965. He definitely experimented with obscure additives to keep his
paints open longer, but so far scientists haven't actually found any mayonnaise
in his paintings.
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Willem de Kooning, for example, allegedly mixed house paint,
safflower oil, water, oil and egg in with his paints. Some surfaces of his
paintings remain soft and sticky fifty years later, which has to present a bit
of a problem for conservators. Anselm Kiefer has used lead, sand and straw in
many of his paintings.
Learning to paint in the 1960s and 1970s, I used a medium
made of equal parts varnish, turpentine and linseed oil, with a few drops of
cobalt drier thrown in. Having seen the ghastly cracking of fifty-year-old
paintings made with this medium, I decided that medium shouldn't be a DIY
project. Better to trust the scientists who work for the reputable paint
manufacturers.
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Mildew attacking
orange paint in a Clyfford Still painting. Courtesy Clyfford Still Museum.
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Another technique I discontinued is underpainting my oil
paintings in acrylics. Certainly, oil-over-acrylic won’t delaminate the way
acrylic-over-oil will, but who can say how the two paint systems will interact
over time? I think it’s fine to paint in oils on acrylic-primed canvas, but any
part of the painting that shows through (and that includes the toning) should
be done in oils.
It was trendy a few decades ago to dismiss the archival
aspects of painting, to embrace the ephemeral. If de Kooning is the equal
of Rembrandt, why would we not want to see his works survive for the ages?
This post first
appeared on October 6, 2013. I realize my use of Yupo is inconsistent with this viewpoint, but I believe it to be chemically compatible with watercolor.
In looking for this, I came across posts about the
2013 government shutdown. The more
things change…
