You’ll need a wet-painting carrier, a drying rack, some wax paper… and plenty of ingenuity.
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| Confluence, by Carol L. Douglas, is the Athabasca River in Canada. Available. |
“What do you use to carry wet paintings?” a student asked. He’s outfitting a new RV in advance of retirement.
For carrying work back and forth from the field, I like panelpak wet panel carriers. They’re lightweight and when you lose or break the rubber bands (which you inevitably will) the company replaces them at a reasonable cost. They come in many sizes, but only one dimension need match the carrier for it to work. For example, I use my 12X16 to also carry 9X12 panels. Since plein air painters usually work on standard size boards, three carriers cover me through almost all circumstances.
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| The Whole Enchilada, by Carol L. Douglas, was painted in Santa Cruz province, Patagonia, Argentina. Available. |
Another good option is Raymar’s wet painting carriers, which are made of corrugated plastic. They hold three wet boards or six dry boards.
If you feel compelled to paint on stretched canvas instead of boards, there are canvas carriers that hold two canvases together so they can ride face-to-face without touching. They’re hard to get in place, and I think they’re more appropriate for the art student carrying work home on the subway than for a plein air painter. The traveling painter is far better off working on boards.
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| Tie rack as panel drying rack. |
These carriers get you from your painting site back to your RV or hotel room. There, you’ll need a drying rack, unless you want to litter your space with drying canvases. In their simplest form, they’re a set of grooved rails that the paintings stand up in. Panelpak and Raymarboth sell versions of this, but I use a ClosetMaid tie rack I bought at Home Depot.*
If you’re on the road for a long time—as I’ve been lucky enough to do—you’ll need a way to carry half-dry paintings. My first stop after the airport is a supermarket where I buy baby-wipes, wax paper and a roll of cheap masking tape. The baby wipes are—obviously—for painting, but the waxed paper and tape are to package partly dry paintings. If they’re dry or almost-dry to the touch, they can travel back-to-front as long as they’re separated by a layer of waxed paper. The tape is to stabilize them on the journey.
I mark these bundles of paintings clearly before flying. The TSA agents don’t want to get covered in wet paint any more than you want them messing up your work.
What if they’re still very wet and it’s time to move on? Your only recourse is to order a pizza. The box is your prize; the meal is a side-benefit. You can stack a lot of pizza boxes in a corner and your paintings will dry peacefully within them.
Sometimes even that can get out of control. When I was driving across Canada, I generated something like 45 paintings in a five-week period. I stopped at a big-box store and bought a plastic bin in which I corralled the loose work between waxed paper. Only one painting—done in very frigid conditions and fairly impasto as a result—suffered any surface damage.
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| Maureen Hart (r) helping Nancy Huson make a painting box with which to fly at my Sea & Sky workshop of 2017. A little ingenuity will carry you a long way. |
There’s nothing like ingenuity, however. I’ve made spacers from old Coroplast yard signs. One of my favorite painting boxes is an old FedEx box for which I rigged handles with duct tape.
*I was shocked to realize I paid $7.98 for them in March, 2017. Today they’re $9.66. That’s up 21%, much higher than the official 6.7% cumulative inflation rate for the same period. Having priced 2X4s, houses and gasoline in the recent past, it’s clear to me we’re entering an inflationary period.