Most stretched canvases available on the market today are made in the following way: usually thin canvas is mechanically covered with a few thick layers of (predominantly inexpensive) primer, then the product is mechanically mounted onto stretchers and placed in a packaging.
Why? It is the only way to manufacture quickly and cheaply a products which also looks quite good.
However, products of this type have a number of disadvantages: poor strength and durability; poor quality of the canvas – often slippery surface (like in oilcloth); poor flexibility; slightly artificial appearance of the substrate; frequent warping of the stretcher frames.
We take exactly the opposite approach:We manually mount thick, dense and strong canvas onto robust stretcher bars, and then we paste the surface and apply a rather thin layer of fine quality primer.
The advantages of this approach include: very strong and lasting stretched canvases, which are also far better for painting. The canvas is usually tighter and more flexible.
The only drawback is the risk that some brushstrokes or other similar flaws resulting from the manual processes may appear on some stretched canvases. Particularly in the lower-priced models, the back of the stretched canvas may be a little less aesthetically pleasing – e.g. there may be a piece of thread sticking out, the folds on the back may be asymmetrical, etc.
At B.Art, all “canvases with a soul” are entirely handmade in line with traditional methods straight out of textbooks and courses focusing on technologies applied in artistic painting.
Owing to the fact that we manufacture stretcher bars and canvas, in the production of stretched canvases we can afford to use components which are far more robust than those used by our competition.
MAKING THE STRETCHED CANVASES
1. We usually use 2×4.5 cm or 3×5.5mm stretcher bars, and adequate bracing. The frames and bars are joined and aligned by hand. We check their quality.
2. Canvas is mounted manually onto the stretcher bars and fixed at the back with upholstery staples.
3. We apply gelatine with high viscosity and hardness and Bloom value of 280 – two layers as a standard. Consistently with the tradition, no priming is applied to the edges of handmade stretched canvases.
4. In the primed canvas models, we manually apply the primer, either gesso type (high grade material, e.g. Royal Talens or similar), or a traditional oil primer handmade in our studio. Depending on the model, we apply two or three layers.
