xIt’s often hard to imagine the work that brings a blank surface to a completed piece of art, but what is often overlooked is the work that precedes that. There’s the question of what surface to use: paper, wood, or canvas? Within each of those options, one has much more to consider: the thickness and grain of the paper, or the origin and veneer of the wood for example. If canvas, stretched or unstretched? What size? What material and thread count? Raw or gessoed (*gesso is a white, paint-like primer primarily used to stop the canvas from absorbing paint)? Every single choice requires calculated intention. Virtually everyone in Ms. Nikki Brugnoli’s Portfolio Art class has made their choices, so what ultimately brings them to their decisions?
For Seniors Gipson Brown and Keiran Snow, unstretched cotton canvas is their ideal match. To work on them, Brown and Snow have stapled their canvas to their studio walls, gessoing and painting directly on the wall. An unstretched canvas primarily offers easy transportation of the material, which is especially important for Brown’s and Snow’s new large pieces. In fact, if Brown were to stretch her canvas it wouldn’t even fit through the studio door. However, a stretched canvas offers its own perks. A taught, smoothed surface is most ideal to paint on and ensures that the work will not be warped from stretching the canvas after painting. Senior Lauren Pao recently stretched her own canvas, hammering together a frame before progressively stretching the canvas tighter and tighter until a smooth surface is achieved. With 3d elements being a part of her design, having a fixed surface is imperative for building out her piece. Senior Lily Forster’s unique combination of oil pastel and oil paint can not be accomplished without a durable surface, so she also opts for stretched canvas. The grain of the canvas picks up the oil pastel as paper would, while still allowing for the heavy and wet layers of oil paint that follow. Aside from canvas, the most common surface for painting is wood. Senior Sofia Kazembe has primarily chosen to work with acrylic on pine wood panels for their smooth, natural veneer. Furthermore, the opportunity to leave parts of the wood exposed offers another stylistic choice. In a series of acrylic paintings, Senior Ellie Masseide chose to leave the exposed wood for its natural quality. Like Kazembe and Masseide, I have chosen to paint on wood, though I work almost exclusively with oil-based mediums. Working with oil on wood requires a slow process of careful layering using a variety of mediums like linseed oil, galkyd, or liquin. Without these mediums, using oil paint straight from the tube will cause the painting to crack and decay over time. Working on wood allows for a natural quality that canvas can’t offer, a trait that I especially value in painting skin because hints of the wood grain can still show through the glazes of paint.
In concluding this article, I hope to have shed some light on the process behind the seemingly arbitrary choice of surface. For every artist, their surface choices are an ever-evolving process that remains a part of their artistic development as a whole and are not to be ignored.
