Want to know how some of the 20th century’s most celebrated artists made abstract paintings? This course offers an in-depth, hands-on look at the materials, techniques, and thinking of seven New York School artists, including Willem de Kooning, Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko. Through studio demonstrations and gallery walkthroughs, you’ll form a deeper understanding of what a studio practice means and how ideas develop from close looking, and you’ll gain a sensitivity to the physical qualities of paint. Readings and other resources will round out your understanding, providing broader cultural, intellectual, and historical context about the decades after World War II, when these artists were active. The works of art you will explore in this course may also serve as points of departure to make your own abstract paintings. You may choose to participate in the studio exercises, for which you are invited to post images of your own paintings to the discussion boards, or you may choose to complete the course through its quizzes and written assessments only. Learners who wish to participate in the optional studio exercises may need to purchase art supplies. A list of suggested materials is included in the first module. Learning Objectives: Learn about the materials, techniques, and approaches of seven New York School artists who made abstract paintings. Trace the development of each artist’s work and studio practice in relation to broader cultural, intellectual, and historical contexts in the decades after World War II. Hone your visual analysis skills. Use each artist’s works as a point of departure for making your own abstract paintings.
1.5 In the Studio: Priming the Canvas
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From the course by The Museum of Modern Art
In the Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting
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From the lesson
Introduction
Meet the Instructors
Corey D'AugustineArt conservator, technical art historian, and artist
Department of Education
Continuing on now, we're gonna talk about the preparatory layers of the canvas.
This is the same canvas that you saw me strut previously.
And you'll remember that there's been nothing wet applied to here at all,
it's simply the cotton duck which is unprimed, unsized.
In this case, only stretched.
Now, what I'm going to do is to use a priming material,
which says GESSO right there.
Personally, this is a pet peeve of mine.
Gesso is a specific material that
goes way back to Cennino Cennini in the Italian Renaissance.
It's rabbit-skin glue and calcium sulfate and a host of other things.
It's, you know, one of the original priming materials.
Well, that ain't this. This is actually just acrylic paint,
believe it or not.
So, I'd refer to it as priming just to you
know call an apple an apple and an orange an orange.
But you'll hear people call a priming,
an acrylic priming, gesso all the time.
Now, true gesso, that rabbit-skin glue stuff,
if you want to go ahead and try that at home,
I can't recommend it enough.
That rabbit-skin glue-based gesso is not really appropriate for a flexible support,
like what we've stretched up here.
Flexible, meaning that you know there's nothing behind the canvas.
It's not like a – back in one second.
It's not like a solid support like this,
where there's a piece of Masonite underneath.
The reason is that rabbit-skin glue is a quite brittle material.
It's also hygroscopic, which is a weird word that
means that it reacts readily to changes in atmosphere,
namely relative humidity and temperature.
Meaning that if I use that rabbit-skin glue priming here,
but then the camera starts to move around on a humid day,
and then it gets cold and it moves again.
Well, that's gonna lead to cracking.
And next time you see an early Agnes Martin painting on canvas,
on a flexible support by the way,
you'll notice a lot of cracking most likely.
I'm talking about her work from the 50s and early 60s.
The reason for that is she used that rabbit-skin glue gesso,
she made it herself up at home.
If you're into cooking, if you're into working with your hands,
you're probably like the procedure.
I do.
But it's really not appropriate for a flexible support.
If you're gonna be painting directly on wood or on canvas stretched over solid support,
knock yourself out. It's great stuff.
For our purposes, I suggest working with an acrylic or,
anyway, a synthetic-based primer.
This one is made by Dick Blick, super cheapo stuff.
It's acrylic emulsion, meaning you can add water to it,
to thin it if necessary.
You can also clean your brushes with water,
no solvent really necessary.
That's nice.
You'll also find some other gessos out there,
so-called gessos, that use polyvinyl acetate,
it's another synthetic kind of emulsion.
It's very similar to acrylic.
For our purposes right now,
for priming, they're really interchangeable.
So, when you pop this baby open,
always remember to give it a good stir.
The reason being that the water and the binder,
that acrylic emulsion binder,
is gonna rise to the top because it's lighter than the pigment,
the white stuff in other words,
which in this case is titanium white.
So if I were just to dip in and start painting,
I'd have stuff that's really runny and quite clear,
meaning that it'd be really streaky and I wouldn't really have
enough hiding power to cover up the canvas – I'm gonna have to put on three coats.
If you give it a good stir first,
you'll ensure that the pigment that settles to the bottom is
quite evenly dispersed now in that primer,
so it's gonna work a lot nicer for us.
By the way, when you cut canvas,
there's always kind of weird little scraps hanging around.
Don't chuck them because they ain't green,
but also because they come in real handy just to you know
clean up brushes and stirs, things like that.
Now, before you start priming,
one thing you need to decide is what you're gonna do about the edges.
And you might want to think about what kind of painting you're gonna be working on.
You might also want to think about do you want to prime the painting,
if you're gonna be working in a Jackson Pollock kind of mode and
the color of this cotton duck is important as part of your palette that you inherit.
Well, then you might not want to prime your canvas at all.
You may simply want to paint on unprimed,
unsized cotton duck or linen for that matter,
or you might want to use something called a size.
This is called PVA size.
It has a consistency of milk.
In fact, it looks like milk.
It dries clear, however.
PVA is polyvinyl acetate,
that polymer we just mentioned.
And size doesn't mean the size of a canvas,
like the dimensions of it, rather,
a size is a clear adhesive that locks in the dimensional properties of that canvas.
In other words, if I were to paint
on this with some acrylic paint that had a lot of water in it.
Let's made up a little Jackson Pollock blob.
This kind of thing.
Now, that water in there, as it dries,
may shrink locally this area of the canvas and I might even get wrinkles in it.
Now, if I apply a size first,
that's probably not going to happen because it's already been locked in
with this clear adhesive which basically just fixes the canvas to stay where it is.
It's still flexible, it's not going to crack like that rabbit-skin glue I mentioned.
The rabbit-skin glue by itself actually is another size material.
But again, I suggest these flexible ones, acrylics or PVAs.
In this case, I'm going to skip that.
It's very easy to put this on yourself at home.
It's basically like painting with milk.
Can't really do it too wrong.
The priming is a little bit trickier.
So now back to those edges,
do you want to prime your edges?
Are you gonna paint the edges later?
Do you want to prime the surface but have
clean edges revealing the cotton duck or linen or what have you?
Well, if you want to do that,
and we're talking about really aesthetics now,
not so much, you know,
the nuts and bolts of how the painting is gonna
react to your physical stress or temperature,
humidity, etc., you could put a piece of masking tape down,
cover that edge, paint-- well, prime the surface,
and then rip that masking tape off and have
a very clean line right down that turnover edge.
So that you'd have the clean canvas on the side and the prime canvas on the top.
Something you can try, if you want.
In this case, let's say that I'm planning on making, I don't know,
it's a Barnett Newman-type painting,
and I will paint over the edges eventually,
so I'm gonna prime over the edges, for now.
The biggest error, the most common error that students often make with the priming
is to put too much on – to dump on way too much priming.
And then when they start doing this kind of thing,
you get left with a texture like that,
with big brush strokes and all this extra paint.
That's really a mess to work with. So don't do that.
Just put on a little bit,
and then really stretch that priming out because it stretches all one way.
Now you probably don't really want to leave any thickness here in your priming because
(a) it's gonna be some brushstrokes that have nothing to do with your painting probably,
and (b) it's gonna take a lot longer to dry if there's a lot of paint on there.
So, by stretching it,
I'm ensuring that I'm not gonna have these very loud, gestural,
you know, kind of brush work in the underpainting,
unless for some reason you want that.
And I'm also showing that because it's thin,
it's gonna dry in, well,
15 minutes or even less,
so if I'm in a rush,
I can start painting almost immediately.
What I'm doing here is painting all in one direction, you'll notice.
I'm going, well in your orientation,
top to bottom, bottom to top.
In other words, not going diagonally and horizontally.
The reason for that is if I want to put on a second priming layer subsequent to this one,
why would you want to do that, first of all?
Well, if you want a thicker,
more absorbent ground to work on,
you might want to do that.
If I put on that second layer,
what I can do is in that second layer,
work perpendicularly to the first one so that
any brushwork I leave here is not gonna be reinforced by a second application,
but rather kind of cancel it out by a perpendicular one.
So, by ensuring that right now
all of the brushstroke that I'm leaving is all in the same direction,
if I want to put on a second coat later,
I can do that in the perpendicular direction.
So what I'm doing now is just kind of fanning out the paint,
making sure it's relatively even,
making sure I'm not gonna have these big tracks left behind
which are gonna get in the way later.
And I just want to make sure that I'm covering,
you know, all of the canvas or 99.5 percent of it.
If you have these little tiny holes in the priming like that,
well, chances are that's really not gonna bother you
at all later since you paint over it.
If you're gonna leave exposed areas of the priming visible in the finished painting,
well, then maybe it would bother you and you want to make sure to knock them out.
Now, by the way, if you're using cheap brushes,
like I am, invariably you get these bristles that get stuck there.
Now, if they get stuck there, it's gonna stay there.
And in fact, when you paint, it's gonna collect paint around it,
which could be really annoying to you.
Or if you're like Agnes Martin, you might embrace that,
and take this as kind of this randomly-inherited chain of occurrence that,
you know, the painting almost has a life of its own.
OK, if you're more like Barnett Newman and you hate those things,
Newman actually had a set of 20 tweezers apparently of all different shapes,
you can use a tweezer to get them out or you can just use your fingernail,
pop it out of there,
and then just cover the tracks.
That kind of thing. And no one will ever know.
Now the sides, obviously,
we're just gonna do the same thing.
Again, priming the sides is really more of
an aesthetic decision than a functional one since unless you frame your painting,
you're probably gonna see the sides but you may not paint on it at all,
and it really doesn't have a chance to move around too much later in a way you wouldn't
want to because it's stretch right around the wood in that position.
So, again, in this case,
just for the hell of it,
working on the priming of the sides here.
Interestingly,
when you're working this way,
you may feel the canvas tightening up right in front of you as you're working on it.
The reason is, well,
it's the same reason actually that your cotton clothes at
home will shrink when they go from the washer to the dryer.
As this priming layer is drying here,
and you can fan it out more if you want to,
as it's drying, the canvas is shrinking underneath it.
So lucky for you if you didn't do such a bang-up job stretching the canvas originally.
It's gonna tighten a little bit now as it's drying.
In fact, you can hear that.
That's quite a bit tighter than it was in that last lesson.
And in fact, it's gonna tighten up even a little bit more as it dries.
But essentially, there we have it: a single coat of
a priming and acrylic emulsion priming, in this case.
And one that if I were not satisfied with,
with the appearance of it or with the thickness of it,
I could put on another one perpendicular to it.
Also, you can sand it later.
Make sure to dry first.
You don't want to start sanding a wet painting,
you're just going to smear it and ruin your sandpaper.
You can sand away any texture that you don't like.
Or, I mean, you can really get, like,
if you build up four or five thicknesses of gesso,
you can then polish it down to almost like an ivory or
an alabaster finish just by using finer and finer grits of sandpaper.
If you're gonna paint the Mona Lisa,
that might come in handy.
And finally, I just want to introduce how these keys work.
Let's say that even after this step,
your canvas was still really, really slack.
And it's still a little bit wet, by the way.
If I wanted to force dry this,
I could take my hairdryer to it.
Well, guess what, I don't have a hairdryer, but you might.
You can take your hairdryer to it.
Or if you're working where we are here in the studio,
I can just run down to the bathroom and put it under the hand dryer.
This is acrylic paint.
It's gonna dry with hot air like that in 30 seconds literally.
Here, you know, it's gonna dry in a couple of minutes.
But let's say it's totally dry and it's still a little bit weak.
This is where these keys come in.
Now, we talked about the expandable corners of those miter joints before.
We didn't notice these little slots that are kind of a catty corner to that miter join.
The reason that they're there is that these keys go in.
And you'll notice that the key is kind of this interesting triangular shape,
and the long edge of it is gonna go parallel to the interior edge of the stretcher bar.
So it's gonna go into that slot, like so.
And you can just get it started with your thumb like that.
And then another one is gonna go perpendicular to that,
again, with that long edge, that bottom edge,
the way I'm showing you right now is gonna go parallel to
the long inside of the stretcher member,
and that's gonna close down like so.
And I don't need to force it right now.
I just need to get that started.
Now, if I wanted to expand that corner,
I would come in with a very small hammer or
a mallet or what have you and start whacking on it,
whacking on it right here and then whacking on it right there,
whack it under right here, whacking right there.
A little goes a long way, so don't overdo it.
But eventually, you'll start opening up that joint.
By the way, would I want to do that,
holding the canvas up like this and whacking on it with a hammer?
No, because your hammer is also gonna hit the canvas
right here and dent it probably or crack the priming or what have you.
So, when the canvas is dry – and this
one's not quite so i won't show you – but when it is dry,
put it face down,
so that when you're working with a hammer,
there's nowhere, there's nothing for you to dent really because if you go too far down,
you have the table underneath to keep your hammer from
really doing any damage where you don't want it.
So in other words, your hammer or mallet or what have you can open up this miter join and
increase tension on the canvas by just whacking on these keys.
And once they have that tension in there,
they're probably not gonna fall out.
If you're really worried about that,
and conservatives do because those keys can fall out and get wedged down
there between the canvas and the stretcher bar and then crack the paint later,
well, you can make a little hole in that and take
some fishing line and run it through the hole and staple it so it doesn't go anywhere.
Don't worry about that for your own paintings,
more just for your information.
And it's time to clean up.
I've done kind of something that I don't recommend is
leaving acrylic paint brushes that are wet,
leaving it out to air dry, because, guess what,
this paint is drying at the same time this is.
And if acrylic dries on your brush, it's garbage.
It's not quite garbage,
but it's no longer useful for painting.
It's useful as, well,
a stirring rod or a Jackson Pollock brush to kind of drip paint off of.
So I always suggest – this is water by the way – just standing up your brushes in water,
just so they don't dry out.
If I want to use gesso again,
I wouldn't go right back into the gesso because I have all this water on my brush.
I would first, you know,
give it a good drying off so I
don't really thin out that priming material more than I want to,
and then I could go ahead and keep priming.
In this case, since I just want to clean it,
I'm just gonna go ahead and stir the brush in the water,
knock it out against the sides a little bit, like so.
Then any extra paint in there you can just knock out, like so.
And then when you're at this stage,
then you can just go to the kitchen sink or what have you and use soap and water
or dish detergent and water and then just let it air dry.
And the only thing is, when it air dries, keep it upright.
Don't have it like this because if it air dries and your bristles are all smushed,
it's gonna dry that way,
and chances are that's not really
the profile of the shape of the brush head that you want.
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