In easel painting as well as in mural painting, the support is of great importance for the final appearance of the work of art.
The traditional materials used for the support did but slowly evolve. The wood panel, traditionally square, was either hewn out of a single plank or - to gain more width - assembled with roughly identical planks. Wood was the natural choice as it was the most readily available universal material in pre-industrial times. However, using massive natural wood is in many ways inconvenient.
Cut wood, i.e. wood that no longer makes part of a living tree, carries inevitable internal tensions. Wood fibres and cellular mass develop under constant stress. The cellular structure counters and stabilizes natural unequal growth coming from bends, twist and turns necessary to keep weight above ground and the tree in equilibrium. When wood is cut into planks, the inside tension, freed from all balancing forces, makes planks warp and bend. Furthermore, wood absorbs and dissolves humidity with consequential structural changes. Keeping the manufactured panel in too humid or too dry conditions, or alternating its storage in humid and dry atmospheres, inevitably makes the wood "work" and weakens adherence of painted layers. This is already a problem with the singular plank painting and serious drawback with the assembly.
In spite of these shortcomings, the panel gave the perfect support for the smooth-surfaced oil painting technique as developed in the 15 th century. The support helped to give the multilayered paintings of that day a never before seen transparency; a feat that would have been impossible without the stiff panel underground.
The stretched linen canvas was easier to manufacture and lighter to handle; the linen being stretched onto a thin wooden frame. The design of the stretcher developed continuously over the years to improve maintenance of tension and to lessen deteriorating effects produced on the stretched material (breaking edges). As with all natural materials, linen is subject to naturally reactions that are spread unequally over the surface and that cause bulging, slackening and tear.
After the First World War the modern board developed, made out of wooden ply, fibres or particles. The great advantage with board was its physical inertia, a direct result of its compound manufacture, producing relative insensitivity to structural tension.
The use of linen canvas as support for easel painting has remained popular well into our days. The aspect of any painted surface varies depending on the combination of painting technique and supporting structure. Painted canvasses that for some reason are laid on board tend to lose much of their initial surface characteristics and the aesthetic result is often unsatisfactory.
There was an evolution in the oil painting technique that accompanied the described evolution of the support. With canvas as support, oil painting became more painterly', i.e. brush-strokes were naturally left more visible. This interesting fact we'll come back to in another post.
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