Cracked oil paint

I looked her up, I love her stuff. https://www.haideejo.com/

I haven’t painted anything on anything but paper for a while. I think I’m safe with that…don’t anyone tell me otherwise! AAAAA.

Sunny, it may well be the board, but using too much turp with your paints can also make them crack.

Yes, I do use a bit to do couple thin layers before I get serious, so that could be it as well.

This has really made me panel-shy even oil paint shy now.

Hi Sunny,

Don’t lose your confidence. If I gesso a panel, I degrease with methylated spirits, then I always seal it with two coats of Golden GAC 100 or at least acrylic Matt medium, then gesso. I still think it was the boards at fault. It is not uncommon to just use gesso.

Thanks Joseph! I will go back and paint some more…at some point.

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I like to use panels, too. Ampersand are a tad costly here in Britain but I have a number and they are really nice to use. I also sometimes cut up MDF board, seal that with a mdf sealer or Golden’s GAC100, and then add two or three coats of acrylic gesso (got Liquitex at the moment).
But larger paintings pose problems because rigid panels are of course heavier. Although not active now on DPW, I’m still painting and have branched out a bit onto some larger pieces and am using stretched canvas. I rarely purchase ready-done stretched canvas any more because a lot of them are more like trapeziums than rectangles. I buy the stretcher-bars and canvas and do my own, then I know they’ve got ninety-degree corners!:grinning:
I learned a trick about sagging canvases; spray the back with water, sponge it around a bit and then lie the thing down to dry naturally. Tightens up like a drum!

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So glad you are still at it! Found any other avenues for selling or are you concentrating on the creating?

Well, I’ve sold a couple of little ones at local shows…and was rather taken aback by the sale of three larger pieces around Christmas/New Year (about 2 feet wide), via an online gallery that I’ve been a member of for about four years (a British one). They were rather abstracty pieces, too…not something I do much of, other than for play and experiment. Guess I’ll have to do some more now! Other avenues…not specially, the commission rates charged by some are real hefty, very off-putting. But yes, still painting and having fun.

I commented on this a while ago… but didn’t want to elaborate, because when I said “stretched canvas is the gold standard…” it was “just my opinion.” I just reread the thread, and decided to add… gluing your canvas to a rigid support to me sounds like the death of a painting… the "rigid support, whether it be wood or fiber or anything else, is subject to the laws of physics… and unless that canvas can be unmounted from the “rigid support,” environmental factors can forever damage the piece. Wood warps, these new panels have no test of time to see what will happen… any type of panel, if dropped and gets a damaged corner, can never be fixed once the canvas is glued to it. If it warps, once again, no solution, And what type of glue? The glue would have to be entirely ph neutral… or goodbye artwork. A stretched canvas has nothing but bone dry wood stretchers touching the artwork, which can be removed and replaced at any sign of warping or environmental damage. A stretched canvas is entirely free of any constraints of environmental damage, and can be remounted at will for hundreds of years. A piece of canvas glued to a board does not have that flexibility. Once again, just my opinion.

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Hi Randal,
Time is the real test. Historically you are spot on. The proof is all the old master paintings that exist. In recent times though there has been a lot of discussion with the adverse effects of zinc oxide in oil paints, causing delamination over time. This is more likely to happen with works on stretched canvas, where the work is prone to flexibility, so a rigid support is suggested as a better option to minimise the risk.

I no longer use oil paints with zinc in them. Not easy to find oil paints of titanium whites without zinc, but Williamsburg I do believe have gone completely zinc free now with their titanium whites. I do use panels with canvas glued using archival pH neutral glue as well as stretched canvas, but no more zinc…