Using hessian

Hessian is the prominent material used by both Alberto Burri and Sandra Blow. In a previous post on my blog I show how I tried to replicate this material, by dieing a white cloth to recreate the material and how it would fall across a page. Now I actually had hessian, I didn't need the coffee dye. I wanted to recreate my two favorite experiments so far on the material of hessian to help my towards what I could do for my final outcome. I was considering using the material hessian to create a composition but first I need to look at how it would react with paint, glue and a heat gun. I first started by recreating my "layers falling away". On paper, I usually just add the dark colour first, then add the layers of white paint. However this material is very dense but has the texture of it being weaved together, by this I mean that theres lots of small holes throughout the material that allows the to paint easily seep through. So, I decided to add a thick layer of emulsion paint as the base of the layers, I knew that this would create a thick barrier like protection for the black paint that I would be adding to the top. To dry the paint I used the heat gun, I say this because I've never used a heat gun with this type of material before, it's hard to dry this material without setting it on fire, which could  present as a problem when trying to make the glue and white paint bubble. Anyways, I added the black upon the white and dried it. Then added two layer of emulsion paint, I'd normally add about four but I didn't think that it was necessary because the paint seemed to keep it's density on the material. Once all layers were completely dry, I began to move the different materials around to encourage some of the white pieces of paint to fall off. In terms of getting the paint to chip off, this material was a lot easier to work with. Paper will leave the creases you create whilst trying to chip the material off but hessian just bounces back. It leaves no creases at all. However, it just doesn't create the same texture effect that using paper does. This disappointed me greatly. I really believed that hessian would give me more texture because of the prominent textured structure it already gave out, but it did not. The paint still chipped off well but you couldn't see the small cracks that the paper allowed it to show up. Therefore it just didn't work as well. Now, I thought things would get better when using the glue with the material. It didn't. I first mixed together glue and white paint, I then added it to the material, they worked really well together. The thickness of the glue prevented too much off it to fall through the material. Once I began to dry the mix, I couldn't put the heat gun to close to the material because of a serious fire hazard. This gave me the same dilemma that I was presented with when I tried to use black tissue paper. Therefore I had to let it dry naturally. You can clearly see some burn marks on the material from when I tried to heat the glue up enough for it to react. I did consider the glue might still look affective when dry, it could have created a new texture that I have never worked with before so I gave it a chance. I ended up with a thick, pointless line of glue across a piece of hessian. 

Overall I am happy that I have conducted this experiment. I feel that is has helped me towards my final outcome and what I can and can't work with.