Got Panels?
I remember the Fredrix painting panels of the 70’s – 90’s. They were pretty awful. Typically the lowest quality cotton duct glued to a really flimsy piece of cardboard. Besides the surface being like painting on cheap plastic, they were very susceptible to moisture and temperature variations. I made a decision early in my art, I didn’t wan t to work on these surfaces.
I learned to stretch my own canvas while in high school and while the early ones literally fell apart, with time I learned how to put together a really solid stretched surface to work on. I developed a liking for painting on the better high end linens and eventually considering most cotton duct student grade.
Right around the time I was mastering stretching canvas for my paintings. George O’Hanlon of Natural Pigments was touring the US with his “Painting and Best Practices” seminars. He was telling everyone that would listen, “At some point, ALL stretched canvas will fail.” He wasn’t wrong, it was a pretty simple concept. It was just against everything we were taught. The great masters worked on stretched canvas right? (Yes they will all fail, and many have already been remounted)
Painting panels had already been getting better for some time and many artists had already made the switch. Having thrown most of my large stretched canvases out due to an inability to move or store them long term, the decision to switch to panels after returning to painting 10 years later was a easy one.
Today you can get some really great panels with amazing painting surfaces. They are some of the best surfaces I have ever painted on and are far better for long term conservation & storage. There is clay board, gesso board (acrylic primed), oil primed. You can get high end Belgian Linen mounted on a board. They have boards made from Masonite, fiberboard, aluminum, and even copper. Aluminum and copper backings being completely unaffected by humidity or heat. It’s not just oil & acrylic surfaces, you can even get fancy watercolor paper mounted on board. I’m even exploring options for mounting the expensive linens I bought years ago for stretching on boards instead.
Its a change that’s a little hard to swallow having invested so much into stretched canvas, but it is a good change.
Raymar panels are my favorites. By my experience their quality is hard to beat. Ampersand also makes some pretty good painting panels.
