Gesso painting

How is a gesso painting different from a fresco painting ... 

In a gesso painting, a board support is layered with a plasterlike ground, the gesso, and a painting is made on this ground. 

Either of these gesso grounds will provide a brilliant white painting surface. Unlike a fresco painting, in a gesso painting the artwork is painted on a dry surface and does not soak into the surface. 

An Impressionist artist, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), painted pictures of dance hall patrons and dancers directly on brown paper supports. Other artists painted on canvas coated with gesso, a chalky substance mixed with glue and water. This is a popular ground still used by artists today. 

More often, modern artists use canvas supports for their paintings and coat their canvases with gesso. In 1979, Andrew Wyeth used such a canvas to paint Braids, a portrait of a woman. Interestingly, he used egg tempera paints similar to those used hundreds of years ago. 

Gesso is also used when preparing a canvas for oil or acrylic painting. Canvas stretched on a frame is the support. The gesso ground is applied with a brush to the support, a procedure called priming. The gesso acts to seal the canvas fabric so that the paint applied will not soak into the canvas. 

Students will debate the pros and cons of using a gesso ground for a painting. Materials... 

In Activity 3.3 you will experiment with nonobjective art using the gesso grounds prepared in Activity 3.2 and egg tempera paint prepared in Activity 2.5. Egg tempera was used by many artists in Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Today, it is still used by some artists, notably Andrew Wyeth. In this technique, egg yolk is mixed with distilled water to form a binder, and a pigment is added to make egg tempera paint, which is applied to a gesso ground. 

Students will apply paint to a prepared gesso ground. 

Egg yolks, pigments (see below), powdered or liquid tempera (poster paint) in assorted colors, and distilled water, or egg tempera paint prepared in Activities 2.3-2.5 gesso grounds prepared in Activity 3.2 narrow-width paintbrushes with soft bristles paper towels mixing trays water containers pencils. 

Paint on the gesso ground to create a feeling of movement—across, up, down, around, in, out, or any combination of these—using shapes and lines. 

Activity 3.3 Nonobjective Art Egg Tempera Paint on a Gesso Ground.. 131 Support for the Artist Paper.132... 

Sulfates contain S04, which combines with metals and other elements. Gypsum, the most common sulfate, is used to make plaster and wall board. It is often used as gesso or filler in paints, and its massive form (alabaster) has... 

Traditional gesso is a material made from chalk and gelatin or casein glue, and painted on wooden panels as a surface for tempera work. Polymer gesso... 

Gypsum may be calcined and slaked to produce gypsum plaster, also known as gesso or plaster of Paris (q.v.). This was used as a ground for panel paintings, of which these are numerous examples documented in paintings from Southern Europe (Gettens and Mrose, 1954 Martin et al., 1992). 

Maintenance or Removal of Old Paint. A number of museums have problems related to the renovation of old painted surfaces. In two cases the present author has been involved with health effects and maintenance problems related to earlier paint renovation which were still evident after several years. In one of these museums, further renovation was necessary to correct the first renovation problem. Whenever museum repair or renovation involves old painted surfaces, the existing paint should first be tested for lead and other toxic metal pigments. Both indoor and outdoor paints manufactured before 1976 are likely to contain lead. Metal-primer, boat, automobile, and artists paints may still contain lead legally, and many in fact do. The backing for murals and the gesso under oil-paintings are also likely to contain some lead. 

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