Painting Puzzler

[Bruce Papier]

An artist just dropped off a couple of paintings she did on canvas on strainers with the canvas being held in by a rubber gasket like they use on screen doors (the gasket fits in a groove on the back of the bars). The canvas shrunk while in storage and has popped out from the gasket. One of the paintings is now 2" smaller vertically in the center than at the corners. The strange part is the canvas isn't visibly distorted. There are no waves, puckers, or signs of internal stress. The canvas is just a different shape now. Of course, she wants me to get the canvas back to its original shape. I don't think there's any hope. Any insights?

 

[JFeig]

Bruce,

Don't you just love it when a person makes a conscious decision to purchase a sub standard product and wants it to work just a good a prime product.

I suspect that the "canvas" is a plastic fiber of some sort that shrank in an unstable environment. I do not see a way to put "Humpty Dumpty" back together again. You could restretch it on proper bars with either tacks or staples; But, I doubt that you can bull it back into a true rectangle with no loss of some part of the minage.

 

[Bob Doyle]

J when you said it could have shrunk in an unstable environment are you thinking that it shrunk along the lines of shrinkwrap? If so then I can't think of anyway to unshrink shrinkwrap. I would tell the person that the only real way to "fix" the problem would be to reorder another print... I'm assuming it is a print on giclee....

You could offer to try to slowly heat and stretch to unshrink the melted plastic, but be sure to charge twice what the replacement will cost. That way when they leave you can order the replacement and tell them you did the imposible

 

[Prospero]

I've seen readymade canvases with the 'stapleless' fixing. Cheap and nasty. They generally have snotwood bars to boot.

As for getting it back into shape.........

Good Luck.

 

[Bruce Papier]

She bought a blank canvas and painted a picture on it. The canvas appears to be cotton, it's not the kind of funky fabric a lot of giclees are done on. It looks like the fabric just shrunk like crazy, but mainly in one direction. It's still the same size near the corners, so my mental image is that the fabric shrunk so much it pulled the bars down toward the center until the gasket pulled out and the bars sprang out to their original shape. It's just so strange that all this happened without the fabric having any stress lines in it.

 

[GUMBY GCF]

I know a guy how specalizes in this type of problem
His name is Mike the Magican....

Would like to see a picture of this 2" never saw one shrink that much what is it 60"s

I asked a manufacture once about the plastic they used in making those canvases. How long before the plastic dried up and shrank....? Go figure he could not answer me. He did tell me that it was less expensive to make them that way.

 

[Prospero]

I had a Cuban painting that had shrunk badly. It was very thin cotton (typical bedsheet material). It was stapled and the staples held, but they were about 5" apart which resulted in a nice scalloped pattern in the weave. I corrected it by blocking it like a needlework. Lightly damped and pinned to a board. Let it dry and repeat. Was a colossal PITA and took ages but eventually I got it back into shape. The trick is to do it little by little.