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Originally Posted by Pam Powell
. . . The article . . . scared the bejebees out of me.
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Good. That's what it was meant to do. Lead white? Lead is poison. So is turpentine and a number of the other pigment stuffs, solvents and vehicles used extensively through the last 500 years. Linseed oil yellows, resins cause paint failures, and we are all doomed. Doomed I tell you!
TRVTHS: 1. Lead carbonate + linseed oil = the most durable, long-lived paint films.
2. All oil paint mixtures will eventually dry to become a brittle, inflexible layer. As it dries, stresses due to the materials and behavior of the painting supports, underpainting layers, overpainting layers, leanness/fatness of those layers and the pigment stuffs employed may cause cracking, separation of paint from the ground or support, and various other failures.
3. It's really difficult to screw up a painting so badly as to see obvious, drastic failure inside of ten years.
4. Zinc white is relatively new in the armamentarium of oil painting, having been introduced in the last 150 years or so. Numerous paintings employing it have been painted during this time, which are in reasonable condition, but if you use VanEyck for a yardstick of permanence, the jury's still out.
5. If there's any advantage to using zinc white, perhaps it would be to provide the transparency of a lead white with a "non-toxic" material.
(I wonder who eats all the paint?)
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