Wise to Art

In easel painting as much as in mural painting, some knowledge of the supporting material is indispensable for correctly judging a painted work of art.

The support in easel painting has a long history. In the days of the natural wood panel, the traditionally square surface destined to receive the artwork was either hewn out of a single plank or - in order to gain more width - manufactured by assembling roughly identical planks. Wood was the natural choice, being the most readily available universal material in pre-industrial times. However, natural wood has important inconveniences.

Cut wood, i.e. wood that is no longer part of a living tree, has inevitable internal tensions. Wood fibres and cellular mass grow slowly under constant stress. The cellular structure of the growing tree must counter and stabilize strains coming from unequal growth consequent to structural bends, twist and turns necessary to keep disproportionate weight above ground and in equilibrium. When a tree is cut into planks, the inside tension, not anymore meeting any balancing exterior force, will make planks warp and bend. Furthermore, wood continually absorbs and dissolves humidity resulting in considerable structural modifications. Keeping the manufactured panel in too humid or too dry conditions, or alternating its presence in between humid and dry areas, will inevitably lead the wood to “work” and will detach, in the process, any applied layers of paint. This is a difficulty with the singular plank painting and an outright nightmare with the assembly. An assembled panel can be seen as a gathering of unruly elements.

Then stretched linen canvas came along as substitution for the natural wood panel, being easier to manufacture and lighter to handle; the linen being tightly stretched onto a thin wooden frame. The design of the latter - the stretcher - continuously developed over the years to better maintain the tension but also to counter the deteriorating effects on the stretched material (breaking edges). As with natural wood, linen is subject to tensions and reactions that are spread unequally over the total surface and that result in, for linen, bulging, slackening or tear.

After the First World War the modern board took over the scene, made out of wooden ply, fibres or particles. The great advantage with board was the physical inertia that the synthetically assembled mass brought with. No more of that extreme sensitivity, neither to humidity (not always though) nor to structural tension.

The use of linen canvas as support for easel painting has lingered on into our days, mainly for traditional reasons. What is true is that the aspect of a painted surface varies depending on the calibrated combination of the painting technique and the stiffness of the supporting structure. Canvasses that for some reason or other are laid on board tend to lose much of their initial surface characteristics and the result is often disappointing.

There is a natural evolution in the oil painting technique that accompanies the described evolution of the support, but this is a topic that we will return to in another post.