by Hank
Recently I was working on a Poster for the Narrowsburg Art Fair “Riverfest,” sponsored by The Delaware Valley Arts Alliance. The poster will be sold at auction on July 28, which is a fund raiser for the DVAA.
The idea of joining several slats of wood together forming a visual pattern is not new to me; I have been doing this with my vases for a long time. Of course the vases are cylindrical and the poster is flat.
Joining the wood was no problem; neither was sanding and sealing the wood. That’s where the “NO PROBLEMS” ended. The first coat of polyurethane went on OK, but the second coat went down spotty and dusty. That’s when I should have walked away from the project for a day or two, or at least a few hours. I sanded the second coat out and put on a third, then a fourth, and a fifth, each coat worse than the previous one. I finally tried spraying on the top coat but this only made things worse. What a mess.
I don’t usually have these problems finishing a piece, so I decided to strip off all the poly and start over again. A wise person once said “to do the same thing over and expect different results is madness.”
The next day I super-cleaned a different brush, thinned and strained the polyurethane and started over. The poly went on the wood like a stamp on an envelope. When the second coat went on and dried the poster was finished.
I try to follow the philosophy, “I never make a mistake, because when I DO it, it is the right thing to do.” It’s only afterwards that I know it was a mistake.
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