Canvas, Bounce and Limiting Beliefs
Making scribbles on a small canvas.
Limiting beliefs
Do you have limiting beliefs? I know I do. Pesky beliefs that may or may not be true, but hold me back in some way or other just the same.
Case in point: “I don't like working on canvas. Stretched canvas has bounce, and I don't like bounce”.
I think I may have picked up this distaste for canvas and adopted it as my own after an art professor, whose work I respected, mentioned how she didn't like the "bounce" of a stretched canvas.
This simple comment about her preference primed me to look for the bounce when I tried painting on stretched canvas for the first time in art school. Is it any surprise that I didn't like the bounce either?
What is bounce?
Bounce is that little bit of movement you get when a piece of canvas has been stretched over the wooden frame support. Even if the canvas has been stretched very taut, there is always a little give in it.
There isn't any give on a wood panel, so I've been working with this substrate for years rather than stretched canvas. I've shied away from the dreaded bounce.
But there are potential advantages to painting on canvas, especially when working at a larger scale. Canvas panels are easier to move around the studio then wood panels and lighter to ship to collectors. A large canvas can be removed from it’s stretcher bars and stored or shipped rolled in a tube and then re-stretched at a later date.
So after years of avoidance, I tested my limiting belief that I don't like working on stretched canvas and challenged myself to find a way to use it despite the bounce. It was time to work on canvas again and give it a fair chance.
The canvas challenge
The test was easy enough: I purchased six smallish stretched canvases and began painting.
Very quickly and to my surprise I barely noticed the bounce. The first few layers of paint on canvas were done with joyful abandon, without thinking about where the process would lead. I then experimented with watercolour pencil marks to see how these would behave on canvas.
Of course canvas takes paint and pencil marks differently than a wood board does and I’ve learned to work with the particular qualities of canvas.
Despite my initial reservations and my now dispelled limiting belief I'm enjoying the challenge of learning how to best work with this new surface, bounce and all!
Six small paintings on canvas, in progress on the painting wall.
Edit: One of the paintings in the above photo is featured in another blog post about making DIY floater frames. It’s the one on the top right in the photo. You’ll find an image of the finished painting in this post.
You’ll find all of these small canvases, now finished, as well as other larger sunny paintings in the Hello, Yellow collection.
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