Re: PVA vs RB Glue

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Re: PVA vs RB Glue

In Reply to: Re: PVA vs RB Glue posted by James Morton on 08/21/00 at 9:01 PM:

>>>Perhaps if the Old Masters had had some of our modern materials to use they would have discarded their traditional materials which as unsatisfactory as they were were all that they had available.<<<

I think you ascribe a preternatural understanding of materials to the "old Masters," whoever they are (to most of todays painters, that term refer to Baroque painters. Don't forget that Cennini complained that art had gone down the toilet after the death of Giotto, and the Baroque masters thought that some old guys you've never heard of were the Old Masters). What they had was solid METHOD.

Any medium will yellow and crack whereas well-ground paint will not. Until fifty or sixty years ago, that was a well-known fact and it was even taught in art schools. Now we believe that there's something about tube paints that demands that we thin it to the level of house paint, adding this or that medium. That shows a complete lack of understanding of what a medium should be and what it should do. Today's METHOD is so bad that all of the TECHNIQUE (technical stuff) won't save it. Highly diluted paints are bound to exhibit flaws; wheter it's Rothko's overly diluted canvases that are turning to dust, or several of the Photorealists who used too much medium and are watching their surfaces grow alligator peel.

What's called for is an understanding of painting mediums not based in rumor.