Dennis Hollingsworth

Sherie's Question

Sherie' Franssen asked a technical question in the comments of an earlier post:

The movement has muscle and is making a nice tension. Are you painting on raw linen/canvas? Treating the surface w/rabbit glue? Just curious.

I thought I'd answer with some length:

Hello Sherie':

I was working on Belgian Linen for years, not wanting to paint on white gesso for some reason (I wanted to see the ground). I was using Matte Resin on canvas before that, but then I was throwing transparent skeins of tinted Alkyd Resin (Windsor & Newton's "Liquin"). I called them glaze paintings. I'll have to rescue some images of them to show you all online someday.

I was thinking of switching to canvas, and then I was able to get (my mother imports antique fabrics to the States from the EU, -thank you Mom!) these antique linens that are blond like canvas but with a linen weave. You can see the human hand in the material. They are bought from this region and I like the retasking of the material into the painting's support. It's a step away from the anonymity of industrialization, but don't get me wrong... I'm not grinding an axe against "the man" (modern fabrication techniques). There is an issue of the hand in the work and I don't want to conjure a Luddite mentality about it. Late Modern industrialization adds much to our pallette, but there's something in wet paint not yet eclipsed by the machine.

Lately, I've been thinking of how nice and slick paper surfaces are, daydreaming about gluing absurdly large sheets onto panels. There's no way I can't think of how to do it without trouble. You can seal the paper with Alkyd Resin, a barrier friendly to paper. Sanded gesso/plaster panels are cool, but what work! A faster method is to use Cotton Duck and seal the weave with modeling paste and drywall knives, then gesso with the knives, sanding all the way. It'd be great to pick up a telephone and order slick surfaced panels. Painters John Pomara and Marcus Weggerman use honeycombed aluminum aircraft panels welded onto aluminum frames. But they are extremely, extremely expensive.

As for Rabitt Skin Glue (why are all the materials in caps? dunno), I've talked to conservators and their sagely advice is that it has a tendency to invite microorganisms to eat it over time. The synthetic nature of Acrylic Matte Resin is better, as is regular white glue from the hardware store. There must be qualities to R.S.G. that I don't know about, but I've never got around to doing the ritual boil and stir. "My bad", as they say today.

There is an issue of the mystique of art material (Belgian Linen direction), which I haven't tried to press, but I know it's a way to go. You can see it in Bacon's paintings, for example. It's a matter of money, most times. I also recall -against this train of thought- the rough and ready materiality of Rauchenberg and Basquait.

Paintings that are remembered trump the materials that constitute them.