E.2 Co-creative Contribution of Synthetic Paint on Modern and Contemporary Art Making Practices
Fri Oct 28 / 9:00 – 10:30 / rm 163, University College
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- Jessica Veevers, Mount Royal University
The plastics industry has shaped the creative face of 20th century art making in no small way. Entering the market in 1955, acrylic paint in particular has experienced an extraordinary journey from fantastically novel to utterly banal in a remarkedly short period of time. Synthetic polymer manufacturing was catalyzed by the war effort. Production was maintained by the burgeoning middle-class consumer and their need for coated things such as cars and appliances. While the artist paint market comprised merely a small fraction of synthetic polymer application, mediums such as Duco, Magna, and Liquitex made a significant impact and are indelibly intertwined with what it meant to be Modernist. The reliability of acrylic paint has rendered it relatively commonplace in today’s art making climate, which is a paradox considering the innovative potential it still offers. This session invites papers that look closely at the co-creative contributing forces of synthetic media on modern and contemporary art making practices, with particular interest in the enduring impact of acrylic paint.
keywords: acrylic paint, synthetic art making media, materiality, medium co-creation, art and industry
E.2.1 Rita Letendre: Epoxy Explorations
- Adam Lauder, OCAD University
One of Canada’s preeminent modernists, Rita Letendre (1928-2021) found early critical success working in a gestural idiom that fused elements drawn from the Surrealist-inspired vocabulary of the Montréal-based Automatistes as well as a younger generation of hard-edge Plasticiens, in addition to motifs referencing the Québécois-Abenaki artist’s Indigenous cultural heritage. Following a period of travel in Europe and the Middle East in the mid-1960s, the artist’s style underwent significant transformations upon her relocation to California with her partner, Kosso Eloul (1920-1995). This sea change has been attributed to Letendre’s parallel exploration of serigraphy and work on the large-scale mural commission Sun Force (1965) at California State University, Long Beach campus. Together, serigraphy’s stencil-based process and the monumental concrete surface selected for Letendre’s mural encouraged the artist to reevaluate the highly impastoed surface textures for which she had become renowned. The crisp lines and bold colour fields that would increasingly dominate Letendre’s signature “arrow” paintings on the 1970s and 1980s were outgrowths of this period of material experimentation and creative reinvention. Less well-known, however, is the role played by synthetic paint in this stylistic transition.
In this paper, I situate Letendre’s transformative use of epoxy paint in Sun Force—a medium largely reserved, until then, for spacecraft engines—at the interface between the artist’s epochal enthusiasm for lunar exploration and her engagement with Indigenous star stories. The epoxy medium both materialized this multivalent aerospace imaginary and acted as a catalyst for the artist’s subsequent, innovative use of acrylics and aerosol spray techniques in the arrow paintings and beyond.
keywords: Rita Letendre, acrylic, abstraction, Automatism, Indigenous modernism
Adam Lauder is the author of Out of School: Information Art and the Toronto School of Communication (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022). He graduated with a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in Fall 2016. In 2018, Lauder organized an exhibition on the public art of Rita Letendre at YYZ Artists’ Outlet in Toronto. He has also published on Letendre’s art in the American Indian Quarterly (Spring 2022), Scapegoat: Architecture / Landscape / Political Economy (Winter 2021) and in Canadian Art magazine (Winter 2016). From 2017-2019 Lauder was a postdoctoral fellow at York University, where his focus was computational arts in Canada.
E.2.2 Flaunt the Plastic Qualities: Key trends in the development of acrylic paint and their reception by artists in the UK between 1963-1998
Patricia Smithen, Queen’s University
Although Liquitex colours began selling in 1956, it would be another 7 years before acrylic emulsion paints were sold in the United Kingdom. When Rowney finally launched Cryla acrylic colours in 1963, the reaction amongst artists working in Britain was mixed, with some embracing the properties and qualities of the new, versatile plastic medium while other declared it to be “coloured mud.” The reception to acrylic paint was intimately connected to artists’ technique and which acrylic properties meshed best with their individual approaches to making a painting. Rowney’s earliest advertisements highlighted that Cryla could be worked thickly like oil paints, thinned to make delicate watercolour washes and dried in 92 minutes. Acrylic emulsion paints were based on a new technology and all producers initially struggled to make a good product, however, as they developed expertise in its formulation, artist paint manufacturers were able to quickly adapt to changes in supply lines, technologies, and the market. They created paints with new working properties, colours and finishes and extended their ranges from tens to hundreds of products. Competition became fierce as more companies developed their own ranges and any innovations were quickly and widely copied. While artists were not necessarily embracing the full range of options available, especially those which were deemed 'gimmicky,’ many did utilise different mediums and the new iridescent/pearlescent colours, which afforded a new mechanism for exploring the interactions of light with paint. This ability to adapt and evolve acrylic paint products has ensured its survival and status as the only main rival to oil paint for artists.
keywords: acrylic paint, UK artists, Rowney, Cryla, artistic technique
Patricia Smithen is an Associate Professor (Paintings Conservation) and the Director of Art Conservation at Queen’s University, Kingston. Her PhD thesis (2022, University of London - Courtauld Institute of Arts) was on the development and impact of artists’ acrylic paints in the United Kingdom. She has a Master’s in Art Conservation (1993, Queen’s) specialising in paintings and painted surfaces and an hB.A. in Art History and Critical Theory (1991, University of Western Ontario). Following fellowships at the Canadian Conservation Institute and Detroit Institute of Art, Patricia worked at Tate for 16 years, starting as the Conservator of Contemporary Paintings at Tate Modern in 1999, then promoted to Head of Paintings Conservation in 2007 and Head of Conservation in 2010. Current research projects include technical studies of paintings by Rembrandt and Norval Morrisseau, the behaviour and conservation of modern paints and advancing structural treatments for works of art on canvas.
E.2.3 Fish oil in alkyd paints used by Claes Oldenburg: insights into the fabrication of commercial alkyd paints since the 1960s, conservation challenges, and expectations for the future
Sjoukje van der Laan, Art Gallery of Ontario
The Swedish-American artist Claes Oldenburg (1929 - 2022) was a pioneer in artistic expression, subject choice, and non-traditional material uses. In the 1960s, the decade where Oldenburg made his permanent mark in the art world, he created Ice Cream Soda and Cookie (1963, collection: Art Gallery of Ontario/AGO). This life-size sculpture of an ice cream soda is created with alkyd painted plaster and glass (the ice cream soda and the cookie), and furthermore a stainless steel spoon, a paper napkin, a ceramic plate and a painted serving tray.
While examining the object’s condition in 2017, the AGO's conservators noticed a white crystalline efflorescence on the painted surfaces. In an attempt to find a possible explanation for this phenomenon, samples were taken of the crystalline efflorescence as well as the paint and sent to the Canadian Conservation Institute for scientific analysis.
The paint was identified as oil-modified alkyd paint. Alkyd paint is a solvent based industrial paint with polyester polymers as resin. This paint dries glossy and hard—one of the reasons why artists start using this synthetic paint since the second half of the 20th century (among others: Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Sydney Nolan).
An interesting outcome of this scientific research is that the oil component in the alkyd paint was identified as fish oil. Fish oil has been widely used for the formulation of alkyd paints since the first half of the 20th century and still is today. However, over time fish oil does not cure as well as other (plant-based) drying oils, having a higher relative abundance of free fatty acids and saturated triglycerides. The crystalline efflorescence that was detected on Ice Cream Soda and Cookie is a result of fish oil in the alkyd paint that Oldenburg used, and brings interesting conservation and preservation challenges.
keywords: alkyd paint, fish oil, art conservation, efflorescence, Claes Oldenburg, collection and preservation practices
Sjoukje van der Laan is an art conservator, specialized in contemporary art. She holds a Master’s degree (MA) and a Professional Doctorate (PD. Res.) in Modern & Contemporary Art Conservation from the University of Amsterdam, as well as a Bachelor degree (BA) in Art History from the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). She has worked in the conservation studios of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art (S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium), and for the modern and contemporary art collection of the Dutch government. Prior of coming to Canada, she had a private conservation studio in The Netherlands, specialized in contemporary art conservation. Sjoukje has been with the Art Gallery of Ontario since 2016. Her specialization gives her a strong familiarity with the conservation and preservation of a wide variety of modern (synthetic) materials, kinetic art, electronic art and complex contemporary art installations.
