How to Remove Oil Paint From Canvas

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Carlos Navarro, I'm an artist here in Miami, Florida. In this clip I'm going to show you how to clean oil paint off canvases. A lot of people basically don't know what they're doing when they try to get oil paint off a canvas and they wind up damaging the canvas, there's a lot of things that happen when you take off paint off a canvas you might do something called crazing which basically takes off all of the layers of paint. If you want all the paint to come off, that's one thing, but if you're trying to just clean a painting, that's a different story. There's a lot of products, one in particular that I really like is called Gainsborough they have emulsion cleaners and then emulsion products that after they clean they make sure that they give the moisture back to the canvas and so on. They're really, really good, they're located in California. But if you're just interested in getting some paint off a canvas, you need some acetone. And the reason you need some acetone is that that's literally the only thing that takes off the paint. Some products also have acetone in them and you can dilute acetone with a little bit of turpentine. I would not suggest rubbing the acetone onto a canvas because what usually happens is when you rub it, it takes it off but if this was instead of a canvas that you're taking off paint, if it was a painting, then we'd have a problem because you would probably get rid of the nuances and the upper, upper tones of the painting, the top layers and you would probably damage the painting very badly. It's best to be left for a restorer to do that. But if you're just taking paint off canvas use some acetone. If it's something minor you can use a little bit of turpentine. Let's say you have, you've created something onto the canvas and you've got something like this. Well I can just basically use some turpentine pretty much and leave it pretty much as it was without damaging the painting. So that's how you do it, it's not that difficult, just be careful. This is Carlos Navarro, thanks for watching."