AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

Lancelot Ribeiro (1933-2010) was an Indian-British abstract painter from Bombay who settled in England in 1962. This was a fertile period for painterly experimentation in London, with local artists becoming influenced by the American Abstract Expressionists exhibited at the Tate Gallery, the American Embassy and in new commercial galleries featuring avant-garde art. Many artists were looking for alternatives to traditional oil paints and they turned to a range of options; Gillian Ayres (1930-2018) purchased Spectrum vinyl dispersions to mix her own paint in the mid-1960s, Paul Huxley (1938-) recalled buying high quality vinyl emulsions from a shop in Turnham Green and Marc Vaux (1932-) worked with oil-based house paints before turning to acrylics and, later, incorporating nitrocellulose automobile paints. Some artists, like Ribeiro, directly approached resin manufacturers to obtain experimental mediums for their practice. Ribeiro had heard about poly vinyl acetate (PVAc) medium from his brother, artist F.N. Souza (1924-2002), who purchased ‘Marvin Medium’ directly from the industrial suppliers, Margros. Ribeiro was enterprising, approaching many industrial suppliers for information and samples. In the artist’s archive, managed by his daughter, Marsha Ribeiro, there are fifteen responses to his inquiries, including one from Scott Bader, who recommended that he use acrylic binder instead of PVAc, providing a technical leaflet and sample of Texicryl AM655.



A technical study of two works on cotton canvas from 1970 by Ribeiro illustrates how the artist made and applied his own paints. Ribeiro incorporated inks, dropping liquid colourants into viscous media resulting in branched patterns, contrasting these with smooth glossy fields or raised patterns of translucent PVAc paint, exposed ground layers and touches of felt tip pen inks. This paper presents the analytical and imaging results, comparing these to the technical observations of the paintings to highlight how they complement each other. Techniques used include scanning XRF, FTIR, HIROX microscope examination, and imaging with the VSC8000.



The experimental painting techniques by artists can increase the risks of inherent vice. Observations of change and degradation in these two works will be featured, along with conservation issues resulting from the applications of thick films of PVAc paint.