I want to provide some technical details about the 46605 paint quality. An appraiser or Artist professional might be interested in this sort of writing.
There is a heavy grade canvas which came from a sail maker. It is a hundred percent white cotton like the kind used in sail making. I did not cut the canvas piece; instead I found dimensions that were similar to the canvas size; 46605 is the dimensions in inches. The stretcher bars are plywood strips and Masonite reinforced corners. There is quarter inch round molding nailed to the front of the stretcher bars that separates the flat plywood from the canvas. Genuine Gesso paint was applied as the primer.
Like a photograph, 46605 is painted in layers. The color was the first layer of paint. The colors were from Betty’s paint box: see Gevluef’s Betty’s Paint Box. They were old paints and some were dried out. My color pallet was limited to those paint tubes I could get to work from Betty’s paint box. There is no red in the painting. Since the color was the first layer, it was laid down thin with a lot of Turpentine and no Linseed oil. The first layer dried overnight. Next I applied a Dammar Varnish over the entire surface. The color layer did not bleed into the Dammar Varnish. The viewer might have noticed the Dammar Varnish as the reflective parts of the painting’s surface. This middle layer reflects light in areas where the final layer did not cover. The reason for the Varnish was because I did not want any of the color to bleed into the final layer of just shades of light and dark.
The most interesting part of the final black and white layer was the smell of the black paint. It wasn’t the typical oil paint smell. It smelled like used motor oil. These were antique oil paints. I had already been resourceful in using the dried paint tubes in the color layer. So, I was compelled to use this odd smelling black paint too. The black paint came out of the tube pretty good; dry and slightly flaky. There were flakes of metal when I thinned it with turpentine. The final layer was just with black and white paint. I started with thin paint mixed with wax medium. I used quite a lot of wax medium with both black and white paints. Mixing with wax medium gave the surface a textured matt finish. As I went over some parts with more paint I had to use some linseed oil to fatten the paint as I did not want to cut into paint that was already there. Betty’s paint box did not have any white. I used student grade Chromium White. In 1991, there was neither lead nor titanium, artists were accustomed to Chromium. I think it took three days to paint. In each session I covered the entire canvas with paint.
45 PERCENT 