In Support of Canvas

When art began during the start of civilisation, there was no canvas to give support to it, for it would take more than a millennium before such a thing could happen. In the beginning, paintings were made on available surfaces, namely on the walls of natural caves or caves hewn out of rocks, secluded areas that were necessary to shelter such fragile paintings.

Wall paintings in India continued for centuries, accompanied by the mighty sculpture tradition that dominated the temples of this country. This was followed by early manuscripts that were made on palm leaves, before paper arrived in India from Persia.

In the west, it was during the Byzantine period that wood panels were used as supports for small sized paintings while murals and mosaics dominated church walls and palaces. The popularity of paintings on wood panels continued in Europe almost till the end of the fifteenth century when its charm ran out with the development of canvas cloth. Wood panels were heavy and cumbersome and difficult to move around: the arrival of canvas only highlighted their disadvantages.

Cloth has always been used for decorative and religious reasons in very many ways in various cultures. Thangkas, pichwais and pada tempera paintings are examples of art on cloth. But the differences between such works and the canvas support are many. Linen or cotton canvases are tightly woven and stretched taut on a wooden frame. It is because of this tautness that oils, acrylics or any other medium sit comfortably on the canvas. The paint on pichwais and thangkas, on the other hand, is in constant danger of
flaking off since their hanging is loose and floppy without the desired tension to keep the paint safe - despite the wooden pole that gives it weight at the lower end.

All paintings are dependant on the support on which they are painted. The history and evolution of a medium used to make a painting is naturally linked and co-related with the evolution of the support on which it is painted.

Tempera paintings require a hard support which was provided adequately by wood panels but which canvas does not quite offer. Tempera paintings need a well prepared ground for which purpose a hard support like wood or a wall is necessary. Wood panels gradually ceded to canvas supports around 1580, making painting with oils a more acceptable phenomenon. The concept of the ‘oil on canvas’ painting, the easel painting, so easy to transport and carry around was gradually acquiring primary position. Both oil and canvas soon became the chosen medium and support in Europe and England.

What a change a primed and stretched canvas was to the heavy paintings on wood of earlier times! They were easy to move around and painters could make very large canvas paintings without being daunted by the weight or the size. Another innovation – that of oil paints had been gradually perfected over centuries and now became a major player together with the stretched canvas. Oil paints also added to the greater ease with which large canvases could be covered with paint since oils were easier to handle than the earlier tempera medium. Artists reveled in the greater comfort level of oil paints because such paints took a longer time to dry and allowed painters the opportunity to set a more reflective and leisurely pace while they worked. Artists could also now play around with brushstrokes and impasto if desired.

How easy it was for India’s colonizers to bring their art across when they started to arrive in various moments of time during the eighteenth century. Soon after their early introduction into this country, these light and manageable oil on canvas paintings had made their presence felt in royal courts and palaces, affluent homes and government buildings. Academic paintings, represented mainly through the medium of oil on canvas, were soon the focal point in the newly established art schools all over the country.
Artists’ material continued to arrive from England from then on until the middle of the twentieth century, when such importation gradually came to a halt after Independence.

The manufacture of artists’ materials was initiated in the fifties but was handicapped by inferior products for a long time. Indian painters continued to hanker for imported canvas and other paint material. These were years of struggle for the Indian artist as art had limited attraction for the public, money was scarce and good artists’ material was difficult to come by – yet – there was a compulsive urge to paint. Painters recycled their canvases, resorted to jute or ordinary cloth to make their paintings and supplemented their meager resources of oil paints with wax, enamel paint and inert white powders.

The situation was gradually to improve. The quality of products improved as art gradually started to play a significant role. Acrylic paints were made available in Europe in the early sixties and represented an exciting new medium that could be used on canvas. The indigenous manufacture of acrylic paints commenced about a decade later.

Canvas gets gradually hidden by the paint that is applied over it. Yet it is the quality of the canvas weave, its texture and thickness that contribute to the appearance of a painting. There are painters who are known to deliberately use the canvas texture as a visual device in a painting by either leaving certain areas without paint, or else, covering it with minimal colour.

There are many languages and systems in art, many mediums and supports, all of which arrive, disappear and are revived again, perhaps in an altered form. Canvas is a support which is almost a perennial, which, despite the many ‘cutting edge’ art forms and exciting breakthroughs, will continue to remain a steady constant in the history of art and art practices.

Rupika Chawla
November 2009
New Delhi