Professional Artists on What Makes a Canvas Great | Winsor & Newton

I literally just come in and just fuss about and sometimes things work and sometimes they don't. I'll begin with a painting and I'll work on it for like three months but there's got to be a moment when I think yeah that is just so banal and then I know it's finished. It was the beginning of the internet revolution so I wanted to capture a sense of that by substituting paint for the stock listings of the Financial Times. I've been in the UK for eight years after I graduated from Chelsea College of Art and I call myself a figurative abstract painter. I think I made that up. I make mostly paintings and they're kind of inspired I suppose from trying to respond to or capture what I feel are new landscapes which is this kind of data scape or information world. I've been a painter now for about 20 years. I take iconic paintings from famous abstract works, abstract artists and I reinvent them, I reimagine them, I add things to them that shouldn't be there but somehow add a further reading to those works. It's taken me years to figure out what I like to work on. There is something quite fetishistic about you know having a blank canvas in front of you. What I'm looking for in a canvas is strength really so I use the heaviest that I can use that's still relatively smooth and has some teeth you know to it so then the collage can grip onto it. I like the feeling that the canvas is like hanging onto the paint. The one thing that I look for is a quality surface. I'm looking for a canvas that doesn't look too mechanical, that doesn't look too kind of even in a sense, that it would have a little bit of character, a little bit of personality. That's graininess and has a thick texture but also is a bit of silkiness if that makes any sense. The other thing that I'm looking for is a canvas that has a degree of weight and durability to it, a canvas that is well primed. I don't like priming my own canvas, you've wasted all this time and all this money when you can just go buy a pre-primed because I like the consistency of the grain. When you stretch a canvas you're after a perfect tension. I mean keel drying wood is really important for a stretcher so that the canvas doesn't warp. I flick the surface and if it sounds like a drum then I think it's all right, I think it's good. A properly prepared canvas can make or break your painting so yeah durability is key. There are things that you have to consider about the archival durability of your work. Buy the best quality materials you can afford at that time in your life because you know you're only cheating yourself really.