Paint Now . . . Stretch Later?

[Allan Rahbek]

Lesley,
it works for finished paintings also because you glue the panel and place the painting on it. You don't need to glue the painting on the back side too.

When the painting is dry to the touch you can apply it to the panel.

It might be a good idea to place a sheet of acetate over the painting when you rub with your hand and fingers to press it down.

[Lesley Grindlay]

It makes me nervous using a glue that isnt tried and tested with paintings, the last thing I need is for the worst to happen. I had primed some panels I previously used to tape my paintings with masking tape to. I sanded the panels making sure it was clear of tape and glue etc. After the panels dried, the glue from the masking tape went thru three layers of gamblin ground I had applied thickly with a spatula! Here I thought I had sanded away the glue from the masking tape. So the moral of my story is, glue is harsh. Perhaps my best bet is to stretch my paintings, I'm thinking perhaps stretch them over acid free foamboard and push pins into the sides and frame them. I painted these paintings unstretched and stretching them over stretcher bars would damage and crack or move the paint???

[Richard Bingham]

It's well to remember that no material or method is "fool proof". All can be mis-applied to the point of failure. What works well for one person may not give optimal results in the hands of another. We should, each of us, run our own tests to our own satisfaction !!

Painters who pose cart-before-the-horse problems have not done their "homework" in the form of running their own tests. Naturally, things like an adhesive saturating a substrate, then bleeding back through a coating (the masking tape under priming mentioned above) can be "wild cards" that arise "accidentally" regardless of one's knowledge and experience.

A well-made "young" oil painting is not a fragile item. It requires either incorporating an inordinate amount of brittle elements (such as hard resins) into paint films to make them brittle and inflexible inside of 80 years . . . painting on a "loose" canvas, then stretching it over a frame is no more problematic than stretching pre-primed canvas.