Art

Oil, acrylic, screenprint or giclée, and what each one is:

only a painting or a drawing is a single object. Oil dries slowly and builds up texture; acrylic dries fast and is what many younger Panamanian painters work in. Watercolours, drawings and etchings are works on paper and live behind glass. A hand-pulled print, whether a screenprint, an etching or a lithograph, is made in a limited edition, signed and numbered in pencil in the margin, the print’s place in the edition written over the size of the edition. A giclée is a high-grade inkjet reproduction: honest when the edition is stated, but still a copy. The printed canvas sold as wall décor has no edition at all. Sculpture divides between cast bronze, carved wood and resin that imitates both. The setting matters as much as the piece: a spot of lighting aimed at a dark oil does more for it than a new frame, while a wall that needs to make a room feel bigger may want one of the mirrors instead of a picture.

Brushwork, print dots and cold-cast bronze:

hold a torch low and to one side of the canvas. Real brushwork throws ridges that follow the image; a textured reproduction has clear gel brushed on top that ignores what is drawn underneath. Check the edge where the canvas wraps round the stretcher, where an original’s paint stops unevenly and a print shows a clean border or the image simply running on. A magnifier breaks any print into dots, and a printed signature sits flat under the varnish. With sculpture, “cold-cast bronze” is resin with metal powder: lighter than it looks, quick to warm in your hand and dull when tapped, where bronze is heavy, cold and rings.

Sinclair, Trujillo and the paper trail behind a name:

a famous name is what forgers copy, so ask for whatever ties the work to the artist: a gallery invoice, an exhibition catalogue, or the labels shows leave on the back of a stretcher. A signature proves very little on its own, and a certificate is only as good as whoever signed it. A printed décor canvas costs around $30 to $100 new and resells for little, because the same image is still on sale; an original by a working Panamanian painter starts at a few hundred dollars, and what it fetches later depends on the artist’s record far more than on how long it hung.

Foxing, slack canvas and termites in the frame:

most of it comes from damp rather than age. On a work on paper, look for small brown spots under the glass, rippled paper, or a brown line tracing the inner edge of the mat, which means the mat was acidic and has burned the sheet. Bleaching foxing out is risky and the spots tend to come back, so price it as permanent. On canvas, ripples and sagging mean a warped stretcher or slack cloth, a cloudy varnish means moisture got in, and white or green fuzz on the back is mould. Pinholes and fine powder in a wooden frame or stretcher are termites. Run through all of it twice if the piece spent years in a shut-up beach apartment in Coronado.

The back, the signature and the measurements in a painting listing:

photograph the front straight on in daylight with the flash off, because glass throws it back. Add a close-up of the signature and a shot of the back showing the stretcher, labels and any inscription. Give the image size and the outside frame size separately, state the medium and edition number, and say whether it was bought from the artist, at a gallery or inherited. Disclose foxing or restoration up front. A buyer coming from David for a large framed piece will ask for the outside measurements and whether the glazing is glass or acrylic, because that decides whether it rides on the back seat or needs a padded pickup bed.