Short essays about art, painting, art appreciation, theory & being a painter. You can also visit my eBay blog Talking Art with Paul Herman or browse my eBay gallery of small paintings.

In a canvas not unusually long or tall in proportion to its other sides, the signature should be of commensurate size- too small & it looks silly, too large: It takes over the focus of the composition. But in its right size it does inevitably form part of a composition, sometimes unbalancing, sometimes complementing & sometimes even anchoring an item of the composition that wanted to slide off the edge or bottom.

Which size is correct? Well, I’d say: It should be clearly legible from a painting's appropriate viewing distance (generally speaking- three times the diagonal) but should fade at greater distance.

A painter once asked me: “My signature colour is Cadmium red, what’s yours?” But one can’t afford to commit to a signature colour if the signature is part of a composition. As such, one must choose the colour & placement just as he did for every other element of the composition, i.e. uniquely to the canvas.

My mother is a restoration artist or, conservator, as they’re known these days- she performs complex processes on antique paintings in order to clean them, replace missing paint, make a hole disappear or even separate the paint from the degraded canvas to give it a new one to lie on.

Judging by the frequency she runs into the problem it seems many painters don’t realize that varnish, Dammar varnish, is designed to be porous so the oils underneath can breathe, stretch & contract with heat & humidity changes; but this also means it is porous enough to allow dirt to infiltrate it.

On average, depending on the circumstances in which the painting is hung & how well the protective varnish was originally applied, every 50-100 years it must be removed & replaced before the dirt reaches the paint layer (it is always a little magical to see a landscape, under my mother’s careful ministrations, go from its green skies made of the original blue overlaid by a translucent layer of varnish yellowed by dirt- back to the blue it was when it left the artist’s easel).

What she often finds is that the artist has signed after applying the varnish & runs the danger of having his signature wiped off by an inattentive conservator when it is cleaned in the future.

The four corners are the commonly chosen but the middle bottom is also appropriate & when a canvas is being particularly exigent & difficult, I have sometimes found the solution in one of the upper corners but in vertical instead of horizontal. Always being careful, of course, not to sign so close to any edge that the frame will cover it, or worse: part of it.

For the ones that just plain refuse to have their compositions altered by a signature I have two solutions: The back of the canvas or on the front but in the same colour as the background I paint it on. This results in its being difficult to see but I figure if the painting has value for future generations then the experts will find it, & if it doesn’t- what difference does it make?