So a few weeks ago I was returning home down Moore St. and found a huge-ass canvas by a dumpster with a hilariously awful painting on it that looked exactly like something recovered from a Florida retirement home: wide horizontal stripes of heavy-body pastel-colored acrylics, hatched with diagonal indentations, then spattered with a fine spray of black that made it look like some kind of Oreo ice cream. It was funny to look at, but my intent was to strip it all off and use the canvas over. So I bought a can of Rock Miracle methylene chloride solvent, which is used for stripping paint and furniture, got some chemical handling gloves and went up on the roof today to take care of this sucker.
Bad idea.
I leaned the canvas against the elevator mechanical room wall so I'd be in the shade, put on my gloves and started pouring the methylene chloride onto the canvas. This stuff is really thick, light-amber colored, and smells utterly revolting. It's completely open on the roof, and windy (which became really fucking irritating because of my hair), but even then when I caught a whiff of the solvent I almost threw up. So if you're ever going to try to strip something with methylene chloride, don't EVER try it indoors under any circumstances.
I could tell that the solvent was quickly softening the paint, which was really thick in spots, and I continued brushing it all over the surface and adding more. The stuff was really turning into a disgusting goop as it dissolved the acrylic and ran down the canvas. Now, in my impetuousness I hadn't bothered to put anything under the canvas, because I knew any kind of plastic would just get dissolved as well and I was tired of putting this off. In retrospect, I should have at least put some fucking newspaper under there, christ. The goop slid down onto the roof surface and turned into a repulsive mess. I continued scraping and applying and scraping, but it eventually became clear that the canvas would never be clean, and it was smelling worse and worse despite the steady wind. The bucket of water had accreted a foul layer of dissolved paint and solvent floating in it as I periodically rinsed the brush. I was shedding the sludge off the scraper directly onto the roof for lack of some kind of crap-vessel, and after some time, decided the whole thing was a lost cause.
I set the canvas aside and tried to scrape the sludge off the roof, creating a sickening smear that turned gasoline-black from the roof tar with streaks of pastel blue and white. I hadn't set up near a drain so I couldn't try to wash it off, otherwise the water would just pool, and this roof is shitty enough as it is. I found an old, weathered cardboard box elsewhere on the roof and used parts of it to scrape up as much sludge as I could, but eventually gave it up and decided no one would notice, or care, or really be able to do anything about it.
As I was taking the bucket, brush and scraper back down I realized the frame was still good, and that I should have just taken the canvas off in the first damn place, so I came back up with some channel locks and tore the whole surface off, stinking of methylene chloride slime, and threw the canvas in the dumpster.
Lesson learned: stripping canvas ain't worth it! But I've still got more canvas from my last series of stretches, so at least I've got a good frame for free. Or at least, the cost of a few wasted hours.