Nina Royle: Making a traditional gesso wood panel workshop
1 June 2024
Making a traditional gesso wood panel workshop
Saturday 1 June, 1:30pm – 4:30pm
£25
Limited places available: book here
To accompany And so, the magpies multiply (23 March – 9 June, 2024) the artist,Nina Royle, will be offering a workshop on making traditional gesso wood panels like the surfaces that she uses in her paintings in her exhibition.
Traditional gesso is a painting ground (similar to an undercoat) which is made from a calcium-carbonate based pigment called whiting that is mixed and heated together with rabbit skin glue. Between 6 and 10 layers of the ground are applied to a wood panel, in order to create a thick base-layer to paint on. The ground has been used for centuries in Western Europe, pre-dating acrylic and oil-based methods for preparing painting surfaces. Most typically however, it is associated with medieval panel painting. In comparison to painting on a surface prepared with shop-brought acrylic gessos, a traditional gesso surface looks, feels and behaves in a very different way. It is highly absorbent and has a ceramic-like finish, which means that it imparts a dry, fresco-like finish to a painting. It can also be sanded and polished to create an utterly-smooth, ivory-like finish. Different again to acrylic gesso, the ingredients it uses are bio-degradable.
In this workshop you will learn how to prepare from scratch a wood panel coated with traditional gesso. There will then be plenty of time to test-out painting on this surface with a range of different paints.
*Please note, this workshop uses materials derived from animal sources
** All materials provided
*** Please bring an apron or wear clothes you don’t mind getting messy
Above image: Nina Royle, In the Service of Reflections, 2023
Egg tempera on a shaped wood panel with traditional gesso
42 x 32 cms
Photo by Nick Cooney
