How to paint permanent pictures

Chapter 19: LAKES TO BE AVOIDED

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About This Book

The work presents practical guidance for artists on selecting and using pigments, vehicles, supports, and varnishes to produce durable paintings. It explains simple and complex palettes, permanent foundations, preparation of wood and metal supports, and the properties of oils, tempera, watercolors, waxes and mediums. The author discusses common causes of deterioration—fading, darkening, cracking, peeling—and prescribes materials and techniques to prevent them, including labeling and sequence of application. Chapters cover specific problem pigments to avoid, varnishes and blooms, repainting, restoration and cleaning, and framing. Advice is technical but conveyed in plain language to help painters and collectors produce and preserve long-lasting work.

LAKES TO BE AVOIDED

IT seems a great pity that colors like Carmine, Scarlet Lake, Geranium Lake, and dozens of other brilliant lakes of that type, should be sold to painters. The three that I have mentioned will disappear when exposed to the summer sunlight for three or four months, and the painter who says he cannot get along without Carmine is simply painting for the present and losing sight of the future.

In closing this chapter I must express the thought that the time is not far off when every tube color will be labelled as to its composition and as to its permanency for without such a guide, the painter is liable to make serious failures.