Have you ever find a canvas in the street? I am a great expert in canvas recovery. Both the ones I find on the street and the ones I accidentally buy at flea markets when I procure vintage frames for my works.
Often they are canvases with cuts, tears, distortions and, above all, previous work, absolutely too amateurish and with conspicuous flaws in the drafting and varnishing.
To recover the tears, I glue a sheet of thick, strong paper well soaked in 20% diluted vinyl glue on the back side of the canvas.
However, due to the abundant dammar varnish underneath, it was impossible to make vinyl and acrylic adhere. Consequently, I scraped off everything that came loose with a spatula and covered the entire canvas surface again with thick but transparent Japanese tissue paper in a slightly yellow colour.
Then I started to sketch the subject of my painting: in this case the view from my window in autumn in Berlin.
And after a few more passes, with oil pastels, pencils, paper collages and acrylic colors, the final result, (image below) will be a milestone in the research I undertook for this winter. This research is about mixed media and a more abstract representation of cities.
The performance of acrylic colors being different from the performance of oil colors, the research will be more likely to be concluded this summer, when using oils no longer involves aeration problems.
But in the meantime, let’s apreciate the results and enjoy this first mixed mediums on canvas. More will follow soon.
LF
Lupe Ficara 