How Failing to Consider Physics Ultimately Lead to My Downfall

I am a Studio Arts major, and my favorite medium to work with is oil paint. When painting, before you can get to the fun part, you have to make a canvas. Unfortunately, when I made my last canvas, I did not take physics into account and wound up with a bent frame like the one below.

For this canvas, I used four stretcher bars that were each 42” long. I normally use bars that are 3.5” wide and 1.5” thick, but, to save money, I bought cheaper bars that were 1.5” wide and 1.0” thick (big mistake). These bars exert much less force. I hammered the bars into a square, secured the frame, and stapled my cotton canvas to the frame as normal. When you stretch a canvas, the goal is to have it tight and bouncy. However, it’s best to leave the canvas slightly lose when you first attatch it so that when you apply a primer called gesso and the canvas shrinks, the tension force exerted by the bars on the canvas is exerted over a large enough area so that the canvas doesn’t rip. Once I was done making the canvas and let it dry, I discovered a dent towards the bottom of the canvas that I consulted Google about. I followed a video’s instructions and put warm water on the back of the canvas behind the puffed-out dent. This warm water was supposed to provide kinetic energy that would alleviate the strain on the cotton fibers introduced by manufacturers, and allow them to return to their shortened state (this is also why cotton clothes tend to shrink when you wash them at warm temperatures), thus fixing the dent. It worked! The problem was that there was now even more tension applied to the bottom of the bars now. The force exerted on the bars was less than the force the bars exerted back on the canvas, and thus they bent. :(

Before re-stretching my canvas on stronger bars, I painted it. When oil paints are used, the thick paint can be used alone on the canvas and as a result be difficult to move around. Most painters add a paint thinner (usually a combination of linseed oil and gamsol) which reduces the density of the paint and thus decreases the kinetic frictional coefficient of the paint which allows it to glide smoothly across the canvas. If you would like to see the finished painting in person as well as the work of other ARTS375 students, you can at our show on December 5^th! There, you can eat free Hamilton Eatery mac and cheese, and experience an inelastic collision as your moving fork travels to your inclining head, and collides with your mouth where energy is not conserved!