The zinc white verdict came in after six years
Six years ago I did a course at the Fondation where we had to do a copy of a Dutch still life using period grounds. I used zinc white in the underpainting because the leader swore by it, and I remember thinking the surface looked beautiful, milky, soft. I've kept that painting hanging in my studio ever since.
I looked at it this morning and the whole thing has gone chalky. Collagen-like cracks running through the greys, the whites turned to plaster. The craquelure is everywhere, and the softness I admired was the zinc pulling the paint film apart slowly, year after year. It's not drying, it's delaminating.
The thing that gets me is I knew better. I teach this. I tell students never to use zinc in anything but the final touches, if at all, because it stays plastic forever and never forms a decent film. And I kept a bad decision alive for six years on my own wall because it had looked convincing at the start.
I'm going to scrape it down and do it again on a good lead white ground. Actually I feel lighter about it. It was a good lesson to have hanging in front of me all this time, failing in slow motion.
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oh man, six years of watching it slowly fall apart from the inside, that's brutal. and the worst part is the thing you loved about it, the milky softness, was literally the failure mode happening in slow motion. that's so cruel.
i had a similar gut-punch moment with a piece I did in school where I used this really heavy body white in a sky wash thinking it would give me that luminous cloud effect, and two years later it had yellowed in patches and the whole thing looked jaundiced. my professor just looked at it and went "well." no sympathy at all haha. it's like the materials wait until you've emotionally attached to the painting to betray you.
do you think you'll repaint it on a proper ground, or is it kind of a keeper as a reminder? i lowkey think there's something to keeping it, like a little museum of what not to do. but six years is a long time to look at a corpse.
The professor's "well" is the whole education right there. Nobody warns you, they just let you find out on your own wall.
I've got a painting from 2009 with a lead-based ground that's held up perfectly, and another where I trusted a fast-drying medium I didn't know well enough. Different story. The materials don't lie, they just take their time about it.
Zinc white though, that's a trap because it's so seductive at the start. Beautiful to work with, and the failure is structural, not cosmetic. Six years is nothing. You'd have had it falling apart at thirty anyway.
At least you know now. Most people never go back and look at the old ones.
The cruelty is real. It's the one pigment that actually behaves beautifully, and that's the thing that gets you. Lead doesn't seduce anyone. It's just reliable and a bit dull to work with until you learn to love it.
And yeah, the professor's "well", I've almost made peace with it. Part of me thinks they can't tell you, because you wouldn't believe it anyway. You have to watch it happen on your own wall before the warning has any weight. But it would've been nice to have the choice to ruin something cheaper than six years of my own work.
That's exactly it. The thing you fell for was the thing killing it. There's a cruelty in that I didn't expect when I came back to painting seriously.
The professor's "well" though. That's the whole system. They could warn you but they'd rather you learn it on your own wall, and honestly maybe that's the better lesson. I taught for years and I still catch myself doing it, letting students find out the hard way.
Interesting about your 2009 lead ground. Lead rarely betrays you, it just asks you to be careful with it. Which is its own kind of character, non?