WHAT IS A PANEL? WHY USE ONE?

Bottom line at the top: beyond the intangible, your task as an artist is to eclipse all others in luminosity, longevity and demonstrable quality.

What a panel does

A panel is just a strong, stable support on which paints thrive & glow. Canvasses were always the cheap option.

As an artist, you are trying to sell luxury goods. Most art buyers feel very shaky about judging art. Across the luxury goods market, in the moment of the deal, build quality is the chief metric that converts interest into a sale.

How a panel works.

Most panels are made of wood covered with cloth. Gesso, a bonding, isolating layer, is applied to that cloth. Gesso can only be applied to a panel; applied to canvas, it cracks.

Unusually, the back of these Artist’s Panels are completely secured from the ingress of moisture with three layers of shellac plus two layers of high quality acrylic polymer.

A schematic cross section of Artist’s Panels looks like this:

Why Artist’s Panels are special.

There is a total dearth of prestige substrates in the art market. An artist can find elite paints & elite brushes, but no elite substrates. That is because, without my experience and methods, panels like these take 8 – 10 dusty hours each to make. There’s a lot of processes.

My competition is no competition at all. Aluminium panels are tissue thin and acrylic ‘gesso’ is not gesso but plastic paint with a chalk additive to provide a tooth.

My gesso is 94% chalk, 4% hide glue & 2% pigment. No other ingredients are necessary. These are the same ingredients, in the same recipe, applied with same tools that have been used for 4000+ years. True gesso is still the soundest substrate material for a painting. Simple things last the longest.

For a more detailed article on PANEL CHARACTERISTICS, please see the attached pdf: