Hi! Im an art student at the National academy of fine art Oslo, Norway.
I’m interested in using raw linen canvas in my painting, I’ve previously bought white grounded linen and stretchid it the unprimed back as the front. Recently, I received unprimed linen from artist store.
I have experience with rabbit skin glue but since i want to use oilpaint directly on the “size” this is not on option?. I started using artist grade PVA, and a professor tought me how to dilute it with water, ca 1/5 pva to water. it worked well with two coats on cotton but when i started priming the linen the result was really horrible.
i stretched the raw canvas nicely and tight on a stretcherframe and started brushing on pva/water. while wet the linen got really firm and tight but after drying overnight the canvas was completely slacking. after yet another coat the canvas was tight (wet) and later turned slacking but hard as the pva dried. i made tests where i put on the pva undiluted and the result was good but the pva layer dried almost instant, it was uneven and slighly milky plastic looking.
I also started pva priming the canvas unstretched and later had to really struggle to force the canvas to get tight on the frame with canvas pliers, as it did not get really stretched i made the huge mistake to brush some water on the canvas, it get really bad after drying, untight and full of ripples. i have made alot of searching for answers, my proffessors just told me that the key is to dilute with water, and restretch the canvas and give it more glue coats. wich i did, and every time the same thing, tight when wet and loose dry.
after i while i found this article, its the same problem i encountered with pictures
http://dianamosesbotkin.blogspot.no/2013/10/pva-horror-tale.html?m=1
i read that professional canvas maker like cleassens of belgium use acrylic glue to their canvases and coating both sides, is this a better option? can you dilute pva with something other than water?
I know about the Golden products but now i ended up with having alot of PVA and trying to make it work.
Hello,
I am posting this comment just for the interest of anyone else reading, because I realise that this is a years-old question!
I am also in Norway and recognise the problem that the student describes. At the Bergen Academy of Art & Design we also had several rolls of fine portrait linen (bought from a large supplier in Germany) which behaved in the same way. My experience with this linen was identical (although I use rabbit skin glue, not PVA) – the linen would become very taught while the size was still wet, but then start to sag and wrinkle, and would dry as a rippled, bumpy mess. Uneven stretching didn’t seem to be the problem, as I stretched it in the same way as I’ve done with other linen for years and have never had any problems. Additionally, the bumpy surface was more or less uniform all over, with no sign of stress coming from any points on the stretchers. Many of the students who tried using the linen had the same problems and eventually we had to stop selling it to students.
I tried to find out the cause of the problem and nothing came up. My only theory is that the linen tightened and was stretched to such an extreme degree under the sizing, that the fibres throughout the linen broke, and the entire fabric slackened. I wonder if this is a problem with linen that has been observed before, perhaps in cases where it’s stretched too taut before being sized?
I’ve been told that the structure of linen is that the fibres have many small ‘joints’, which give elasticity but only up to a certain point, after which they will break.
Laura
For problems with ripples and loss of tension while sizing, I recommend looking at the stretching technique first. If the fabric is losing as much tension as the images in your linked blog post, in my opinion, the canvas may not have been stretched properly.
Pulling directly across the stretcher frame (the method most artists are taught) can result in uneven tension from spot to spot. It can be challenging to pull with the same amount of force at the corners as in the middle of the bars, even with canvas pliers. An alternate method- stretching diagonally on the bias- evenly distributes tension by displacing the entire network of warp and weft, avoiding tight spots along the span of each stretcher. Also, tacking on the sides of the stretcher rather than the back yields better results.
I would abandon any further attempt to size canvas off the stretchers, as loose fabric. There’s no way to maintain a flat plane or consistent weave pattern this way.
I had a similar experience with a roll of linen. All 12 student in one of my classes ended up with severely undulations after the size dried. So much so that it seemed that the problem was related to individual stretching techniques. I do not believe that the linen fibers were in anyway overstretched or broken. I ended up just not using that linen for painting and repurposed it for another project. I do not generally use the “gremlins did it” defense but, in short, subsequent classes have not had the same problem and I never figured out what caused the issue.
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