Canvas white pigment and calcium carbonate is rather brittle and susceptible to cracking. As lead-based paint is poisonous, care has to be taken in using it. Various alternative and more flexible canvas primers are commercially available, the most popular being a synthetic latex paint composed of titanium dioxide and calcium carbonate, bound with a thermo-plastic emulsion. Many artists have painted onto unprimed canvas, such as Jackson Pollock, Kenneth Noland, Francis Bacon, Helen Frankenthaler, Dan Christensen, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Color Field painters, Lyrical Abstractionists and others. Staining acrylic paint into the fabric of cotton duck canvas was more benign and less
Alden Mason (artist) do the same thing in acrylic that I did in oil?" To develop his ideas, he spent some time working on large paper pieces in search of his voice with this new medium. His works on paper during this period were drawn with a chopstick dragging acrylic paint and painted with thin, gestural washes on paper that had been painted black. The first acrylic works on canvas were done in a similar fashion to the oil "Burpees"; he poured thin acrylic paint onto horizontally oriented, white primed canvas hoping to produce the same effects the "Burpees" had realized. By the