My first canvas

Árabe Durmiendo
Oil on canvas
2008

This is my first attempt to paint on canvas.

To my surprise, I found out that oil does not work the same on canvas as it does on paper. The paint was just running all over the place, and painting "over wet" (alla prima) is completely different from paper. The oil is unstable and color started to mix with each other all over the canvas. It just was impossible to reproduce the dry, watercolor-like, characteristics of paper (see a similar painting I did on paper a few posts ago).

I could not trust my brushes. Sometimes I would load it with brown but it would start to paint white because I had grabbed some white paint by accident from the edges or something. Aaargh! It was really stressing me out. I ended up taking the canvas out of the easel and holding it with one hand while the other would hold the brush still. Basically, I was painting the brush with the canvas!

I also found myself literally pushing the paint around with a toothpick or the palette knife. The oils were just floating on top of each other.

The advantages of a canvas are probably too many for a beginner like me to know. But, for starters, I realized that a canvas:

1) is really resistant: you can just carve with that palette knife and it just goes back to its natural white. I suppose that with turpentine I can wipe it out and start over. Teenager Dalí used to glue real rocks to some of his primitive landscapes. (The rocks would eventually fall from the painting, usually interrupting his family's supper, to what Dalí's father would calmly say "Don't worry, it's just a rock that has fallen from our son's painting.")

2) gives the painting a glossy look: paint will just shine on it whereas on paper it becomes a little dull since the paper sucks the oil away;

3) enables 3D structuring by stacking or layering coats of paint, giving the oil-painted canvas the lively appearance it has when we see it hanging at a museum wall. For example, I wanted to leave the turban color raw, showing the white canvas underneath (which would represent well the texture of cloth), but after everything else was finished, the turban seemed sunken in contrast to the rest of the figure's body. It just looked flat, so I painted a few coats of silverish grey and white to make it sorta multidimensional (I still want to lay some more coats over it, maybe some heavy white plaster, pastel or just plain wax).

Well... I'm going to google "canvas" to find out if a more paper-like canvas exists before I switch back to paper.