Want to know how some of the 20th century’s most celebrated artists made abstract paintings? This course offers an in-depth, hands-on look at the materials, techniques, and thinking of seven New York School artists, including Willem de Kooning, Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko. Through studio demonstrations and gallery walkthroughs, you’ll form a deeper understanding of what a studio practice means and how ideas develop from close looking, and you’ll gain a sensitivity to the physical qualities of paint. Readings and other resources will round out your understanding, providing broader cultural, intellectual, and historical context about the decades after World War II, when these artists were active. The works of art you will explore in this course may also serve as points of departure to make your own abstract paintings. You may choose to participate in the studio exercises, for which you are invited to post images of your own paintings to the discussion boards, or you may choose to complete the course through its quizzes and written assessments only. Learners who wish to participate in the optional studio exercises may need to purchase art supplies. A list of suggested materials is included in the first module. Learning Objectives: Learn about the materials, techniques, and approaches of seven New York School artists who made abstract paintings. Trace the development of each artist’s work and studio practice in relation to broader cultural, intellectual, and historical contexts in the decades after World War II. Hone your visual analysis skills. Use each artist’s works as a point of departure for making your own abstract paintings.
1.3 In the Studio: How to Stretch a Canvas
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From the course by The Museum of Modern Art
In the Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting
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From the lesson
Introduction
Meet the Instructors
Corey D'AugustineArt conservator, technical art historian, and artist
Department of Education
Welcome to Classroom C here at MoMA, this is a studio.
And we'll be here pretty much once a week, where I'm going to demonstrate a couple
things that will most often tell you a little bit about how a certain
artist worked, whether it be his materials, techniques, so on and so forth.
Today, we're going to start with the nuts and
bolts of painting which is actually before the paint.
And we're going to talk about canvas, stretcher bars, the support of a painting.
In other words the stuff you paint on and how to prepare it with primer or
something like that.
So to begin, we'll look at the stretcher bars that I'm going to
be working with and for four sides, obviously.
And I'm working with four 14 inch stretcher bars, so
I'm going to be making a square painting, obviously.
And this brand of stretcher bar tells you in inches what the length is right there.
And the first thing you should probably determine when you get your stretcher
bars, or when you're picking them out at the store, is whether or
not this beveled edge is present on both sides of the stretcher bar.
And by the beveled edge, I'm talking about this half round
which is kind of carved into the outer edge of the stretcher bar.
The reason for that is when you stretch canvas over this edge (and
the canvas is going to be where my right hand is right now),
the canvas comes over that half round,
so that it's not resting on the body of the stretcher bar.
Rather, it's just resting on, really, one point on this half round,
the highest point of it.
And then if you can stretch, parallel to the stretcher bar, but not on it.
Now, the reason why that's important is that when you start painting or
priming for that matter, when you're pressing on the canvas,
it may press down and hit the stretcher bar.
If that happens it'll leave a very strange mark that you're probably not intending.
It can be very annoying if that's in your ground and then you paint on it,
you keep on seeing that mark etc.
So when you stretch a canvas with proper tension, the canvas is going to be above
the stretcher bar, almost like a trampoline or something like that.
So, if that beveled edge is on both sides,
a lot of the cheapos kind of do it for you, like this is on both sides,
then there is no front and back of the stretcher bars.
If there's only a bevel on one side, then you want to make sure that when
you assemble the stretcher bars, that that bevel is always on the same side.
In other words, you wouldn't want to have a bevel and then a flat one,
because then you're really going to have a strange looking support once it's all
stretched up.
So stretcher bars, again, have these corners and
the corners go together rather easily, like so.
Occasionally if you have handmade stretcher bars, these are machine made
cheapos, the handmade ones are sometimes quite stiff in here and you may need
to bang on it with a mallet, preferably a rubber mallet, to get it to close.
If you use a hammer, you could splinter the corner and
that could get annoying as well.
Now, the first thing to do is quite simply,
assemble the stretcher bars in a rather coarse way.
Just pop them together.
You'll notice that the way that I did this, the 14 is not on a stretcher bar.
It's on that face, rather it's on the opposite face.
However, because these ones are kind of foolproof with bevels on both sides,
again, it's not an issue.
Now, in a perfect world, four corners together, this would be a perfect square.
Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world.
Meaning, that we really need to square off this square
because if I just close these miters it's close to a square but not really.
If you're making a fundamental type painting, about the basics of painting and
a very spare, quiet painting and it's a little [SOUND].
Well that's rather extreme but if it's a little off center,
suddenly that becomes really, really distracting.
Now, maybe that's something you're going for and
you can use that freedom if you like.
But the best thing to do when you square off
your canvas is to use something square like a T-square.
Now, if you don't have one of these, what I'm doing is basically just forcing
the canvas open to each corner making sure that each corner has the right angle.
If you don't have a T-square, you don't really need to go out and
buy one unless you're going to become a draftsman or something.
You can actually use the corner of a very square table or something like that.
Or even a door jamb, which comes to a right angle.
You can wedge this up in a door jam and just whack in the bottom.
And I'll be making sure that this corner is right.
And then you do it again, whack on this, then this becomes a right angle and so on.
And what we have now is a square, or very close to a square support.
So that's Step A.
Step B is to cut yourself a piece of canvas that measures
a little bit wider than the stretcher bars that you've assembled.
The reason you want to do that is because you probably want your canvas to be able
to wrap onto the back of the stretcher bars.
The reason is, if you only have this much and
you start pulling tension to here and your staples go there.
Okay it could be fine but what if you're a little bit off center.
Suddenly you start stretching and you get something like that and there's no, no
space to staple there and then you start seeing wood and it's very easily avoided.
So go ahead and just give yourself a little extra.
If you give yourself too much, by the way,
then you can have a lot of extra canvas in the back which is going to make some folds
that you'll see in a moment in the corners a little bit difficult.
But you can always trim away extra canvas later, it's much more complicated to add.
It's much more complicated to add canvas rather than to subtract it.
In other words give yourself a little bit of room to breathe,
a little margin for error.
I prefer to use a staple gun to stretch the canvas.
You can do it the old school way with tacks or brads and hammer.
[COUGH] That's fine.
This is a little bit easier.
By the way, a lot of staple guns work different ways.
So if you haven't used one before, they're really not dangerous at all.
Some people are nervous the first time around.
The only thing to really make sure that you do well
don't stick your finger in front of where the staples come out.
But also when you load the stapler,
pay attention to the instructions first time around.
By the way they�re often inscribed on the side of the staple gun as well.
But they all load in different ways unfortunately.
This one has this little trap door on the back.
It's spring loaded so press in down, and then this whole thing,
and you'll notice the spring, pops out.
This is basically a plunger.
You'll see how that works in a moment.
Then you need to make sure that you have the right size staples.
These are JT-21 size, that's not the brand.
And on your staple gun, it should say somewhere JT-21.
This is going to be really hard to read because it's inscribed in the paint but
take my word for it.
It says so right there.
Now the length of the staples is your next choice.
These ones are five sixteenths of an inch.
They're rather shallow, but we're dealing with a small painting,
we're dealing with small stretcher bars, that's going to be fine.
If you're using a hardwood,
if you're stretching your canvas over a solid support, a piece of hardwood,
you might want to have a half inch or even three quarters inch.
But go ahead and experiment and
see what works for you, the shorter ones tend to be cheaper obviously.
So, unless I have a reason to use something different, I don't.
So the way that this staple gun is loaded is to take the staples, and
then to actually put them right into this track, right there, like so.
Now with the front end of this plunger,
this simply goes right behind those staples, right in that same track.
And then I'm going to do this on reverse by pushing in, sorry,
pushing in up and letting it go.
And now we're ready to rock.
[SOUND] So, The first thing that you want to do
is to make sure that your stretcher bars are squarely in the center of your canvas.
In other words you wouldn't want to be like this because then I'd have plenty of
room over here but not so much over there.
So roughly in the center, parallel to the edges.
And then very simply, no pulling at all, just [NOISE] select one side and
fire a staple right into the center of that stretcher member.
And that's very, very easy.
Now the rule of thumb is to always stretch
to the opposite side from where you just were.
So in other words, I'm going to go here next.
Second staple, now a little bit different.
I'm going to pull hard.
On a small painting, there's no danger of pulling too hard on the canvas.
Much more frequently, students don't pull hard enough, and then you get kind of this
limp canvas going on which causes a lot of problems later.
More on that in a moment.
So go ahead and push, pull rather, really, really hard.
In fact as hard as you can.
What I'm doing is I'm using both of my thumbs right here and
I'm pressing forward parallel to the stretcher bar and using the rest of my
fingers to kind of grab on to the inside of the stretcher bar.
Hold it with that tension in place.
In other words, if it slips back, start again.
Hold that tension in place and then fire [NOISE] directly behind your thumb.
So what I've done now is to stretch in one direction the center of the canvas.
And you can see this ripple here.
And there's a decent amount of tension right there.
And a decent amount of canvas fibers.
So third side, this is kind of the funniest staple
that you're going to apply to this canvas.
Because this one you do want to pull but you don't want to pull really,
really hard because there's nothing I'm pulling against on the opposite side
of the canvas.
So if I pull way too hard, look.
I could just keep on going and really get some strange distortions in the canvas.
Rather, I'm just going to give it a half pull.
Just a baby pull.
[SOUND] Fix that, and again, rule of thumb, opposite side.
Fourth staple.
Now I'm going back to pulling as hard as I can.
And, in fact, every other staple for
the balance of the stretching is going to be pulled with a really strong tension.
Now if you're working on a really large canvas at home and
by large I mean let's say bigger than three feet in a certain direction.
You probably want to get thicker stretcher bars.
Because with this profile, these light duty so-called stretcher bars, a large
canvas may start to [SOUND] torque a little bit as you supply adequate tension.
Now also when we get to the priming layer, perhaps the size layer,
canvases also shrink and they may snap your stretcher bars in fact.
So in those cases it's better to invest a little bit of extra cash,
and get the heavy profile or
at least the medium duty stretcher bars if you're working large.
If you're working really large you may think about getting crossbars
that really keep the painting from torquing but also keep it square.
So four staples in and what we've done
is to fully stretch just the center of this canvas.
And even by that sound, [SOUND] hope you can hear it,
you can tell that that's stretched there as opposed to this.
[SOUND] Nothing, right?
No stretching there because well there's no staples there yet.
So, what I'm going to do next is move to the right on,
again, any of the four sides.
I'm going to move to the right by, well, an inch and a half.
It's not critical.
I'm pulling hard [SOUND] and I'm fixing that.
Now I'm going to go to the opposite side of the painting across the center,
meaning it's going to be over here, meaning it's also going to be an inch and
a half to the right, like so.
[SOUND] Side three, inch and a half to the right.
[SOUND] Side four, inch and a half to the right.
[SOUND] Okay, now I'm going to work an inch and a half to the left.
An inch and a half by the way, this is just how I do it.
Some people really like to put a million staples in there so
it's not going anywhere.
You don't want to go too much further than that because then you start to get a lack
of tension between your staples, which can be really annoying.
So [SOUND] I'd suggest starting with about this distance.
And then if it's not working for you, for whatever reason, go ahead and change.
But this is kind of an average place to start anyway.
And again, I'm really pulling hard.
I mean I've done this a million times so it may seem like I'm just cruising
through this, but it's quite important to give, oops, to give a very strong
pull to the canvas, because it's something that's difficult to achieve later.
Not impossible.
Again across the center.
[SOUND] Now working fifth stapling side to the left.
[SOUND] [SOUND] Don't
turn off this video yet because this might be a little boring to watch,
but the next part is actually the trickiest part your first time around.
Now, what I've done with all these sides, I think, yep,
is I've come just a couple inches from the corner.
When you've done that, you'll have stretched everything except for
those zones around the corners.
So, again, it's really like a taut drum everywhere except for those corners,
which get a little weak, a little wimpy.
So the trickiest part now is how to do the corners.
Now some people get really lazy and they just [SOUND] and staple that back.
And well that's a pretty crappy looking corner if you ask me.
Professional artists, people who sell paintings do this sometimes.
However, there's nothing wrong with it structurally,
it's not like it's going to fall off or anything like that most likely.
If you're going to make very spare paintings that are about paints,
abstract paintings, this kind of thing is really going to catch your eye.
Now, if you're painting in kind of a cartoony, loud, kind of way,
with crazy colors, and spray paints, and all this, well maybe no one's ever
going to notice that because there's three million other things to look at first.
I'm going to show you the way that I think is the cleanest way to do it,
in my preference, the nicest way to do it.
It's not the only way to do it.
That's one way that I think is lame, personally.
Another way to do it is to actually fold the corner over onto the back so
that you see this fold on the side.
Well, in my mind, that's a little bit better, but
that's still a little bit sloppy because you see that canvas edge.
The way that I'm going to show you actually hides that.
With a little origami kind of magic trick so that,
I'll show you how to do it in a sec, that fold is still there, but it's underneath.
So now when you look at that edge it looks nice and clean.
It's not going to distract you.
When you look at it from the front, there's not a whole lot of extra
activity going on in that corner to distract your eye.
So how do you go about doing that?
And I'll repeat this a couple times because I know it's not second nature.
You first have to decide which edge you want that double thickness,
or in fact triple thickness of canvas to go.
In other words, we're making a fold.
And there's all this extra canvas here because it's folded under.
Where do I want that to go?
Well, in this case I want it to go, right on this side,
right where my finger is here.
So, the key to remembering this is rather,
that the bottom of that fold needs to go down first,
since I know I'm going to fold over the top of it.
So the bottom is actually coming from the other edge, with my thumb.
I'm just going to stick the canvas down right there with my thumb.
And this is the bottom edge of that fold and that's going to be hidden,
it's going to be folded over by,
this, like so.
And if you're like me, you'll probably have to learn this by doing it.
This is one of those things that you can learn with your hands better than your
brain or your eyes for that matter.
So again, I want that double thickness to be on this edge right here.
So with my thumb I'm taking the opposite edge and
pushing it down around that corner onto the edge where I want it.
And then I'm going to grab the canvas here, and fold over the top of it.
Now if I do it right, it 's going to come parallel to that edge again and
I can fix it, and I pulled on it by the way.
I can fix it there.
Then you'll have one more staple to pull behind it [SOUND].
And then one more staple to pull here [SOUND].
And then that corner's pretty much done.
Now this is a little bit loose so I'm going to add another staple.
The only critical thing to do, or not to do really,
is that you don't want to staple across that mitre joint.
The reason being is that later on, we're going to use these keys,
these little guys.
That are going to go in there and they if we need
it are going to open up that miter join to supply more tension to the canvas.
However, if I staple that corner shut well then it's not going anywhere right?
So, I just want to make sure that I'm, my rule of thumb is I always
staple parallel to that joint so there's no chance that I'm going to cross it.
So go ahead and always give it a pull [SOUND].
And I'm just going to staple there, parallel to that joint, and
I'll just keep this one done [SOUND].
Voila, done.
Okay, next corner, where is this double thickness going to go?
I suggest keeping them on the same side.
In other words here and here, and then [SOUND] here and here.
Why?
Well you'll see that from the face, there is that,
well triple thickness of canvas there.
If I were to make that next corner here,
it'd look a little funny like a pinwheel, right?
It look a lot funny if I tried to frame this painting,
because an edge frame would be a little bit off the canvas here, and
then it would want to be on the canvas there.
Meaning that the frame would be a little diagonal.
And again, you might not think that's a big deal, but specially in a small
painting, especially on a kind of minimal quiet painting that you might make.
Somewhat like the artists we�re covering in this class,
that kind of thing might really draw your eye.
But if you start with these materials
you understand how the corners work, you understand how the canvas works.
And you really relate to this thing as an object rather than as some
product you bought from the store to paint on.
So I'm just going to go ahead and finish this stretching here.
If this is second nature to you, go ahead and turn the video off now.
If it's not and you want to see that corner a couple more times,
three more times, keep watching.
So that second corner is going to go on the opposite edge here.
And again, I'm going to put the bottom of that canvas down first, and
then fold over the top, like so.
[SOUND] Then evening up the tension.
[SOUND] And then finally just making sure
not [SOUND] to staple over that miter join there, fine.
So this one, you do the same thing [SOUND].
So there's that fold.
Again, it's this side I wanted to go in, so
I choose canvas on the other side, press my thumb down
around that corner, and then fold over the top of it.
And then finally, that last one again I want to put on the same edge as that fold.
So I'm putting the bottom down and then going right over top of it.
[SOUND]
So if you've done a decent job stretching your canvas at this point,
it should be quite taut everywhere all around the painting.
And you should notice that if you start to press down here,
you're not going to be resting right on that wood.
Rather there is a gap there of, I don't know, a quarter of an inch or
something like that.
Perhaps a little bit more where your paint brush is not going to be
knocking against the wood on the back side of the canvas.
So there you have it.
Go ahead and stretch up your first canvas and see how it goes.
By the way we haven't done any preparatory work on this canvas.
So this is just that cotton that I suggest starting with,
simply because it's cheaper than linen.
By the way, if you wanted to paint on a solid support, you
could do something very, very similar on a piece of Masonite or something like that.
Now we don't really need to worry about the canvas moving because,
well there's nowhere for it to go.
Painters such as Yves Klein like to do this kind of thing,
because they paint it with a roller.
And if you're working on a canvas like this with a roller, well then you're
definitely going to press the canvas down and hit that edge of the stretcher bar.
So go ahead and do this.
The reason why more artists don't paint on these things is simply because well,
when it gets big, it's heavier, it's more expensive.
But for our purposes in this scale, they're more or less interchangeable.
So again, a stretched canvas, a square in this case, and
these corners with that nice clean fold over the edges.
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