In the gesso....

This is a message I sent to a friend regarding the progress/problems with the mural and sums up things pretty well:

"I don't think humidity is the problem. I remember stretching 3x5 canvases at the FSC studio with it pouring outside and the door open and there was no problem with the canvas tension. I've had a lot of different suggestions, painting hot water before or after gessoing, blowdrying it, doing it in different order etc, and innitially the results were very good, but within 12 hours the canvases became looser than when I started. :-( In the planning phase of the mural, I wanted to go with home-made stretcher bars, but after discussing it with an engineer, someone who goes to my parish who was asked to help me with the mural logistics, devise an adjustable hanging system, etc, he was worried that we wouldn't be able to make the frames consistant enough to hang together in a 6-panel mural assemblage (made to be removable from the wall, as there are future plans to take down the church's back wall on which the mural will hang when the building is expanded), and all be perfectly square and flush and basically precisely engineered. So I ordered 6 pre-fab stretcher kits from Utrecht (Masters brand) and we began to assemble the frames.

They
were
a
nightmare!

Each frame has at least one bar that is a different length, many joints were rough-cut, almost all were crooked/bowed, and the crossbraces had to be wittled down on the ends to fit into the bars' tracks. We had to pick and choose which corners to make right angles so that the assemblage could hang (relatively) flush together, and when laid out on the floor, there are corners sticking up and the seams are not completely flush. Oh well, the both of us learned our lesson. Individually, the frames would have been fine, but placed together to make a large mural, uh, no.

Now the canvas streching/priming is the new nigthmare, but I am learning to accept the nightmares and try to work around them. We used the corner keys where we put the cross braces, to basically bow out the bars slightly to improve the tension. This produced only very limited success, but it was an improvement. Sigh...I just can't wait to find out what else is going to go wrong. :-) "

Ok, enough ranting. Here are some pictures, two are illustrations of our use of the "corner keys" being used to expand the canvas at the crossbraces (the 2nd one is one of the two trapezoidal panels, so don't mind the odd angles). Next we see the panels all on the floor looking impossibly huge, and then lastly, my CG self is contemplating the task ahead...