Baking paintings

I just read the press release for an upcoming show in May at Boijmans about master forger Han van Meegeren's "Vermeers". I'm not much interested in art forgery (or Vermeer's technique, for that matter). One thing jumped out at me, however: Van Meegeren used a thermosetting phenol-formaldehyde resin in his work. That's what Bakelite is, too -- interesting.

Here's a description of his materials from Wikipedia:

"Van Meegeren bought authentic 17th century canvas and mixed his own paints from raw materials (such as lapis lazuli, white lead, indigo, and cinnabar) using old formulas to ensure that they were authentic. In addition, he used badger-hair paintbrushes, similar to those Vermeer was known to have used. He came up with a scheme of using phenol formaldehyde to cause the paints to harden after application, making the paintings appear as if they were 300 years old. After completing a painting, Van Meegeren would bake it at 100 °C (212.0 °F) to 120 °C (248.0 °F) to harden the paint, and then roll it over a cylinder to increase the cracks. Later, he would wash the painting in black India ink to fill in the cracks."

Now that's a creative mix of new and old materials and techniques, huh? I'm a fairly inventive baking painter (or painting baker), but not I'm sure I'd ever have thought of baking my paintings!

Here are some links for further reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_van_Meegeren (English)
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_van_Meegeren (Dutch)
http://boijmans.m9.mailplus.nl/nct4321365/267FDCnHHdpVXjj (Dutch)
http://www.boijmans.nl/nl/7/kalender/calendaritem/321 (Dutch)