Mounting with plastic food wrap

Someone told me about using Saran Wrap as an adhesive for dry mounting a painting.  The information from this person was sketchy, definitely not first hand.

Obviously that triggered my curiosity.

Mounting is an integral part of the Chinese Brush painting.  The Xuan that we use is fragile and tissue like and it needs a backing for support and white balance.  Traditionally we use a starch solution for the wet mount and the steps are not too difficult, but esoteric none the less.  One of our tourist trap here would display work done on Xuan un-mounted.  The work is displayed in a transparent plastic photo holder the paper would never lay flat and becomes wavy.   I could think of two reasons why people don't mount their Xuan works.  I would like to think that lack of resource is one of them, and the other one could be unabridged ignorance, regrettably.  People are after the flavor, but not the substance.

These are examples of un-mounted works done on Xuan with all the waviness in its glory, and distracts from the works.  This illustrates the absolute necessity of mounting works done on Xuan before displaying them.

My painting of water was just floating around aimlessly so I decided to put it to good use.  I don't have any Saran Wrap at home, but I do have generic plastic food wrap at my disposal.  The way it was described to me was that under heat the plastic wrap would melt, thus binding the sheets of paper together.

Off with the experiment.

I laid a piece of blank Xuan on a flat surface, and covered it with my plastic food wrap.

I then laid my painting face-up onto the plastic wrap, sandwiching the wrap.

onto this sandwich I put a piece of paper to protect my painting and apply heat to this sandwich using my heating iron

Every so often I would lift the cover paper to see how my sandwich was doing.  I turned up my iron when nothing seemed to have happened and I started to not move the iron around so much as in ironing clothes.  I stationed the iron over an area and was counting to 10 before moving on.  When that failed to produce any tangible results, I turned up my iron even more and counted to 20 for each stay over an area.

That was brutal to my OCD.  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight ............twenty!  One, two, three, four, five, six .........twenty!

In the meantime the miasma of heated plastic wrap permeated the room.  My dilemma was to apply sufficient heat to melt the plastic without incinerating my painting.   Should have measured my heart rate.  Another retching experience!

So the process seemed to have worked.  My short stack was intact!

Except for this corner, where it wasn't totally bound.  So I obliged with more heat.

After this sandwich cooled down, I tested its integrity by attempting to separate the layers.  Proof of the pudding is by eating it, right?

And the proof is

I could peel off the Xuan backing ( which is a heavier stock than the painting) with ease, except for a few spots where it actually stuck to the paper, as evidenced by the white tears.

While attempting to remove the plastic wrap from the back of my painting, I could see that the wrap had assumed a burnt color.

I attribute my failure to a couple of factors.

My iron might not have been hot enough, perhaps I was at the cusp of success as indicated by a few adhered spots.  I could have used a higher heat?,  Oh but that stench.

The other plausible reason is that I didn't use the proper brand of plastic wrap?  I know different brands of the wrap work differently for wrapping food, some better than others.  But I'm not going to find out.   Besides I am not sure about the health hazard of breathing in the fumes of melted plastic.

I'll just chalk this up as an interesting experiment.