Talk:Canvas

This canvas is stretched across a wooden frame called a stretcher, and it must be coated with gesso before it can be used.

Is this really true? Some of Francis Bacon's paintings are done on the unprimed side of the canvas - would it have mattered if the "correct" side also hadn't been covered with gesso? --Camembert

Lacking any reply, I'm going to assume that gessoing is usual, but not required (at any rate, I don't suppose Robert Rauschenberg gessoed his Bed before painting on it), and change the text accordingly. --Camembert

This article needs more about the fabric itself - what's it made of? how is it made? After all the use by artists is not its prime application - I suspect that artists started to use canvas because it was a fabric already available for otrher purposes. Whic also means that there should be something in here about its history. Graham 07:27, 18 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

A discription of Canvas

Modern canvas is made of cotton. It differs from other heavy cotton fabrics, such as twill, in the way it is woven. Canvas has a very simple weave, the weft thread just goes over one warp thread and under the next. (The weft thread for twill goes over one and under two and each weft thread moves the pattern over one thread. The result is a diagonal pattern such as you can observe in the cloth use for blue jeans.) Canvas comes in two basic types, plain and Duck. The threads in Duck are more tightly woven. In the USA canvas is graded two ways: by weight (ounces per square yard) and by number. The numbers run in reverse of the weight; so, number 10 canvas is lighter than number 4.

Cotton did not come into popular use until relatively recent times. Until Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, separating cotton fiber from the seed was an extremely labor intensive process. For this reason, I wonder if some of the canvas used for paintings, sails, tents, etc., before the 19th century wasn't made from other fibers such as linen, jute, sissel, hemp, etc.

Canvas Stretcher

Similarly to the comment regarding the fabric, more information on the subject of the design of stretchers and their history could be very useful.