Paint Is Colored Glue

PS: I just shamelessly throw in another excellent BBC documentary series here: How Buildings Learn, by Stewart Brand [0]. I sometimes see it mentioned here on HN, but it cannot be mentioned too often. If you haven't seen it, please please do.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvEqfg2sIH0

Of course, that doesn't really mean that paints work as glues, but you can add pigment/dye to a lot of glues and get a workable paint. (workable in the sense that they will adhere and color. they may not have the consistency that makes them work well as a paint).

The layering described there, is more about what blend modes are for, layering can also be quite dumb by itself. The roots of DTP software layers lie pretty much all in the necessities of print, not painting, where you have to have a layer per color anyway.

Wondering why the article stops short of the point, why (digital) reproduction of paintings is a lossy process in general, and especially for archiving. Total Appearance Capture systems exist but are rarely applied to paintings. A 2D-RGB raster can only represent the appearance of a light reflective object from a single angle und very specific ambient conditions. How a painting interacts with light in a room is a complex process of all kinds of optical phenomena (reflection, absorbtion, diffraction, refraction ...) as described in the arcticle.

The last time I let my university landlord paint my apartment, it took days to clear the furniture, and I was instructed to do no paint prep. There were peels coming down from the ceiling. The painters exploited this "paint is glue" theory by painting under the peels and pushing them flat. I channeled my desire to kill them on the spot by politely escorted them out in mid-job and never letting anyone paint for me again.

The next time I painted this apartment, I stripped the ceiling bare of its many poorly applied layers, and applied $500 of artist-grade acrylic primer and titanium white paint to the ceiling and walls. 15 years later, the apartment looks just-painted. Artist-grade acrylic paint is one of the best glues available, much more reliably so than oil paint.

In the years since, the best wall paints have come closer to artist-grade acrylic paints, and their glues are likely better tuned to typical conditions. Artist paint is more expensive and better. Carefully tuning a cheap glue is like botching an airplane hardware design and trying to fix it in software.

Later in a home, filling holes in contractor botched cabinet work, I started with artist-grade acrylic modeling putty, added just enough dye from the commercial paint manufacturer to match the existing cabinet paint, tweaked the gloss to also match, and created a one-step wood fill that disappeared into the existing paint job when dry. Much less shrinkage than commercial wood fills, and no primer or repainting needed. Again, acrylic art supplies making the best glue.

I learned that the actual painting was nearby in NYC at The Met. When a friend visited, I wanted one of my goals was to go to The Met and see the painting. I entered the American Wing close enough to closing time that I worried I may not find the painting in time. I started wandering, turned a corner, and sat dumfounded starting at the very thing I was looking for, sitting 21 feet in width at the end of the hall.