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Whatever you do, don’t paint from the heart

14 September 2009 in art technique by David | 36 comments

Occa­sion­ally you see books, arti­cles, or work­shops ded­i­cated to help­ing artists “paint from the heart,” loosen up their style, whack them­selves on the side of the head, dis­cover the light of Tus­cany, or some other damn thing.

It’s crap. Your heart will never have any idea how to paint.

Of course, there are a few artists out there who could ben­e­fit from some loos­en­ing up. For every one of them, there are a hun­dred oth­ers who need to learn how to actu­ally paint. This entails the acqui­si­tion of dif­fi­cult skills and the mind­set to use those skills to achieve spe­cific goals. Some of those skills are:

  • How to draw
  • How to draw exactly what you see
  • How to draw the figure
  • How to draw the portrait
  • Pro­por­tion
  • Per­spec­tive
  • Fore­short­en­ing
  • Color the­ory
  • Color mix­ing
  • Com­po­si­tion
  • Brush han­dling
  • Ren­der­ing
  • Art his­tory
  • And lots more

That is the case even if you want to paint loosely. Read Richard Schmid’s book on paint­ing (he paints in a loose alla prima style that is won­drous to behold) and you’ll see how hard it is to learn how to paint that way, too.

Heck, it’s a lot of work learn­ing to paint abstractly, if you want to do it well.

Paint­ing from the heart is for lazy peo­ple who just want to schmear paint around, feel artis­tic, and find peo­ple to tell them how won­der­ful it must be to paint.

Instead, learn to paint with your mind and your soul. That’s a lot harder, but will take you much fur­ther toward mak­ing paint­ings that belong on a stranger’s wall.

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Light on the painting

2 May 2009 in art technique, painting by David | 4 comments

Lately I’ve come to real­ize that the light on a paint­ing as you’re work­ing on it is as impor­tant as the light on what­ever you are painting.

I’ve recently added a light over my easel that pro­vides more illu­mi­na­tion than any­one would actu­ally shine on a paint­ing that was being dis­played. I tend to keep it off much of the time while paint­ing, but turn it on peri­od­i­cally to check my work. Under a higher level of illu­mi­na­tion, I often catch prob­lems, espe­cially in the deeper shad­ows. With­out enough light, it’s easy to miss inac­cu­ra­cies in value, hue, chroma, or gra­da­tion. These prob­lems might not show up too strongly when the paint­ing is dis­played, but can be sig­nif­i­cant enough to cause notice­able errors.

Of course, the color of the light shin­ing on your paint­ing should be neu­tral enough that it does not itself intro­duce dis­tor­tions and thereby lead you mis­un­der­stand hue rela­tion­ships while mix­ing paint.

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Quick book review: Classical Painting Atelier

9 January 2009 in art books, painting by David | 10 comments

I had not read any­thing by Juli­ette Arist­edes, but ran across her book “Clas­si­cal Paint­ing Ate­lier: A Con­tem­po­rary Guide to Tra­di­tional Stu­dio Prac­tice” in a book­store while on a busi­ness trip this week. As the title sug­gests, it is ori­ented toward the kinds of infor­ma­tion pre­sented in a mod­ern clas­si­cal paint­ing school, gen­er­ally known as an ate­lier, after the 19th cen­tury sys­tem of pro­fes­sional French art instruction.

Classical Painting Atelier
Clas­si­cal Paint­ing Ate­lier: A Con­tem­po­rary Guide to Tra­di­tional Stu­dio Practice

I don’t per­son­ally find Arist­edes’ work to be par­tic­u­larly com­pelling, but this is a very nice book. She mixes instruc­tion on art his­tory, meth­ods, pro­ce­dures, and his­tor­i­cal teach­ing meth­ods with sug­gested exer­cises and excel­lent repro­duc­tions of paint­ings by great mas­ters of the past. Addi­tion­ally, she pro­vides brief pro­files of mod­ern artists who use clas­si­cal paint­ing meth­ods, such as Jacob Collins, Daniel Sprick, Steven Assael, Andrew Wyeth, and Tony Ryder. Arist­edes has a broad edu­ca­tion in art and a gift for lucid, thought­ful expla­na­tion. Her focus is far less on mate­ri­als and meth­ods (although these sub­jects are touched on) than on com­po­si­tion, use of color, selec­tion of sub­ject mat­ter, and other issues related to bring­ing an artis­tic vision to effec­tive fruition.

Rec­om­mended.

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Paint strings

14 December 2008 in art materials, art technique, color by David | 1 comment

Michael writes,

Dear David,

My ques­tion is in ref­er­ence to “Paint Strings”. I’ve never heard this term before. Is this an oil paint­ing tech­nique? (I’m just learn­ing to paint and I’m using slow dry­ing acrylics if that makes a dif­fer­ence.) Can you one day do a blog post­ing about mak­ing paint strings.

Thanks, Michael. “Paint string” is an oil paint­ing term because other kinds of paint dry too fast for it to be prac­ti­cal. What it means is to pre-mix a series of col­ors in a gra­da­tion from one color to another. Usu­ally, the string goes from high value to low value at a sin­gle hue. Typ­i­cally, chroma is high­est in the mid­dle of the range, because that mim­ics the pro­gres­sion of chroma across objects in the real world, and because that’s eas­i­est to mix.

You can use paint strings in a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent ways. At one extreme is to just mix one or two strings that you think you’re likely to use. For exam­ple, you could have a string of neu­tral grays that you use to decrease chroma in mix­tures (the best way to decrease chroma with min­i­mal effect on other aspects of chroma is to mix in a neu­tral gray of the same value). You could also mix a string of “aver­age” flesh color in prepa­ra­tion for work­ing on a fig­ure. Per­son­ally, this is usu­ally how I work with paint strings.

At another extreme is a “set palette.” This means that you care­fully plan out the col­ors you will be using and mix them all out before you begin paint­ing. That way, you don’t worry about mix­ing as you work because the col­ors are right in front of you. Frank Reilly, for exam­ple, was a 20th cen­tury artist who taught a set palette method. Artists who work with set palettes often tube a bunch of their most com­monly used mix­tures so that they don’t have to spend so much time at the begin­ning of each paint­ing session.

You can pre-mix color with water media, but you need to do some­thing to pre­serve them over the course of your paint­ing ses­sion. I have not tried the new slow-dry acrylic paints and have no real sense of how they behave. With oil paint, it just works that way naturally.

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Critique of “Discovery” by Phil Holt

7 May 2007 in art technique, painting by David | 3 comments

DiscoveryI recently offered to pro­vide a pub­lic cri­tique of paint­ings and draw­ings that any­one might want to send to me. In response, Phil Holt has sent this one. It is “Dis­cov­ery,” 12 × 16”. I assume it’s in oil as he describes him­self as hav­ing painted in oil for sev­eral years. He notes, “Obvi­ously painted from a photo. I morally pre­fer to paint from life but was intrigued with the facial expres­sion on my grand­daugh­ters face.”

It takes some courage to send an image that you’ve spent many hours on and send it off to a stranger to look at and cri­tique pub­li­cally. That’s espe­cially the case since a com­puter image of a paint­ing is never per­fect, par­tic­u­larly when it is not pro­fes­sion­ally shot. There are, for exam­ple, a few strange color/value tran­si­tions that I think are almost cer­tainly pho­to­graphic arti­facts. One exam­ple is the lack of gra­da­tion in the paint around the girl’s right hand. My guess is that it isn’t there in the paint­ing itself (I’m sure Phil will cor­rect me if I’m wrong about that) or that the photo exag­ger­ates what’s there. So what I’m doing here is look­ing at a photo of a paint­ing and doing my best to imag­ine what it looks like with­out dis­tor­tions intro­duced by mak­ing a photo of a paint­ing and send­ing it as a JPEG file to be viewed on some one else’s com­puter screen. Read the rest of this entry »

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The fuglies

16 January 2007 in art technique, painting by David | 3 comments

There is a slang term used in the U.S. (usu­ally by women): “the fuglies.” It refers to days or weeks when every­thing seems wrong with your appear­ance and you just can’t man­age to look the way you want to. The term is also some­times used to insult some­one you find unpleas­ant to look at. The word’s ety­mol­ogy is pro­fane.

In my expe­ri­ence, just about every paint­ing goes through one or more fugly stages. There is a point where the paint­ing, at least to the artist, is hideous and seems unre­deemable. There is no point to con­tin­u­ing, because the paint­ing is doomed. I’d post more work in progress shots, but the fuglies really bother me.

Unless you are pre­pared for the fuglies, they will destroy your abil­ity to fin­ish any paint­ing. It takes a leap of faith to look at a work in progress, be revolted by what it looks like now, and believe that it has poten­tial nonethe­less. You have to believe that you can make it look right, even though right now you can’t stand to be in the same room with the thing. The more you’ve done it, and the more you can remind your­self that you’ve been able to get through this before, the eas­ier it gets.

If you’re a begin­ner, it’s even worse. You may not yet have made a paint­ing that looked any­thing like what you wanted it to, so it’s hard to keep work­ing on what feels like a piece of junk from start to fin­ish. That’s a leap of faith as well—faith in the idea that even if this paint­ing is ugly, the next one will be less so. Take my word for it: if you keep at it, your work will get better.

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Disegno and colore

9 January 2007 in art history, painting by David | No comments

His­tor­i­cally, two of the impor­tant words that Ital­ians used to describe the act of paint­ing were “dis­egno” and “col­ore.” As I under­stand them, the words had broad mean­ings that I’d like to dis­cuss a bit.

Dis­egno meant both “design” and “draw­ing.” It referred to the whole process of plan­ning and lay­ing out a paint­ing, up to and includ­ing any under­draw­ing. It also referred to what we think of as draw­ing, inde­pen­dent from painting.

Col­ore meant both “color” and the process of apply­ing paint. It included select­ing which col­ors would be used where, lay­er­ing paint, blend­ing paint, shad­ing, brush strokes, and so on.

I absolutely love how these words bring together con­cepts that are sep­a­rate in Eng­lish. If in paint­ing I make a mis­take in place­ment, I might say that I made a “draw­ing” error. But unless I did an actual under­draw­ing that doesn’t quite make sense. In Ital­ian, how­ever, it is exactly cor­rect to say that the dis­egno was not right. It’s also great to have a word for the appli­ca­tion of paint and its rela­tion­ship to color. One can say that, in his later life, Tit­ian paid less atten­tion to dis­egno than he had pre­vi­ously and put most of his empha­sis on col­ore. Impres­sion­ism is all about col­ore and less about dis­egno. In the 15th cen­tury, Nether­lan­dish paint­ing impressed Ital­ians with their colore—their won­der­ful and pre­cise appli­ca­tion of paint. These words just make incred­i­ble sense to me.

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The core palette

8 January 2007 in color, painting by David | 11 comments

I’ve dis­cussed some palette strate­gies lately, and I thought I’d go over mine. I am very com­fort­able work­ing with a lim­ited group of low-chroma paints, but I don’t always want to make low-chroma paint­ings. So I use what I call a core palette.

That means that I have a core group of paints that I almost always have on my palette. These include flake white, burnt sienna, raw sienna, yel­low ochre, and ultra­ma­rine blue. I am very, very famil­iar with how these paints mix together. I’ve used them over and over; they no longer hold any mys­ter­ies for me. Lots of paint­ing prob­lems can be solved with just these paints, because most of the world is pretty low in chroma and is filled with hues and val­ues that can be mixed with these paints. By using low chroma paints, rather than neu­tral­iz­ing intense col­ors as some painters pre­fer, it is much eas­ier to avoid acci­den­tally drift­ing the chroma too high.

When needed, I will add some other low-chroma paints, includ­ing red ochre, Stu­dio Prod­ucts’ Tus­can red, Williams­burg Ital­ian terre verte, Doak French ochre extra pale, burnt umber, raw umber, ivory black, trans­par­ent blue oxide. When I want very bright, opaque whites, I add tita­nium white. When I want very sub­tle mix­tures with white, I add zinc white. I’m pretty famil­iar with how all of these col­ors work

That’s 90% of the paint I use. But there are times when I need more chroma. If so, I pull out some of my big­ger guns: virid­ian, Pruss­ian blue, cad­mium red, bis­muth yel­low, cobalt blue, gen­uine ver­mil­ion, pyrol ruby, Doak Flo­ren­tine lake, Doak Alger blue, Indian yel­low, diox­azine pur­ple. I don’t know these col­ors that well, so when I use them I often need to spend time exper­i­ment­ing with how they mix. Often, I use them to inten­sify mix­tures of my more stan­dard col­ors. When appro­pri­ate, I use them with only slight mod­i­fi­ca­tion, for those small areas of chro­matic color that can really make a paint­ing jump (or fall, if done badly). Lots of my paint­ings don’t have any of these intense col­ors, but I like hav­ing them there when I need them.

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Mixing dark yellows

7 January 2007 in color, oil painting, painting, personal by David | 2 comments

So I’m work­ing on a still life as a gift for my brother and my sis­ter and law. They used to blow glass (hey, Steve and Linda, if you’re read­ing this—are you ever going to get back to glass again?). Any­way, the sub­ject of the still life is two lovely glass Christ­mas orna­ments that they gave me some time ago. It seems like a nice full-circle kind of gift. (Yes, I know it’s late.)

The two orna­ments are sit­ting on a yel­low com­forter. Since that takes up the fore­ground, mid­dle ground (except for the orna­ments) and back­ground, most of the com­po­si­tion con­sists of yel­low fab­ric. It’s an oil paint­ing on a ges­soed hard­board panel.

On my first pass, I messed up the color of the yel­low. For the lights, I used mostly ochres, espe­cially Doak’s won­der­ful French ochre extra pale. In the darks, I used raw sienna, bunt umber, and raw umber. That was a lot of time pant­ing com­plex folds of fab­ric, and while I was doing it it seemed fine to me. The next day, it just looked wrong. After some thought, I real­ized that I had screwed up the chroma of the darks, mak­ing them too dull. When I focus on the darks, they look pretty low in chroma. But when I painted that dull­ness, it became clear that the over­all rela­tion­ship between the chroma in the darks with the chroma in the light was wrong. That can hap­pen when the dif­fer­ence between one color and another is sub­tle, but repeated through­out a paint­ing. An error that would not be notice­able if it was in only one part of a paint­ing looks really huge if the same prob­lem repeats itself over and over.

So I went back over the fab­ric parts of the paint­ing (after wet sand­ing for good adhe­sion from one layer to the next) and re-painted, pay­ing more care­ful atten­tion to chroma. For darks, I used yel­low ochre, raw sienna, burnt sienna, and ultra­ma­rine blue instead of umbers. That worked much better.

I am no hater of umbers; for really low-chroma yel­lows, they are hard to beat (some artists think that umbers are “dead­en­ing” col­ors just like black is pur­ported to be). But in this case, they were not the right tool for the job.

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Snapshots

4 January 2007 in art technique, painting by David | 6 comments

I’ve noted pre­vi­ously that, while there is no such thing as cheat­ing in art, pho­tographs present cer­tain prob­lems when used as ref­er­ence mate­ri­als for real­ist draw­ing or paint­ing. These prob­lems are exac­er­bated when you try to do some­thing with an ama­teur snap­shot, which is typ­i­cally to be used as the basis of a por­trait. To be use­ful as a por­trait ref­er­ence, a photo really needs to be com­posed largely in terms of the direc­tion and inten­sity of light. Does the light illu­mi­nate the face in such a way that the struc­ture of the nose, the brow, the mouth, and so on are clearly delin­eated? Are the lights blown out? Are the darks impen­e­tra­ble? Are there lively catch­lights in the eyes? Will the smile on the face trans­late into some­thing that looks like a hor­ri­ble gri­mace? (Almost all por­trait paint­ings, in my opin­ion, are bet­ter if no teeth are showing.)

No one gives the least thought to any of that stuff when tak­ing, or judg­ing, a snap­shot. Nor should they. But if they bring it to you and ask you to trans­late it into a paint­ing, you need to be will­ing to explain why that’s just not a good idea. Even work­ing from life, it takes great skill to paint a good por­trait. It’s even harder when work­ing from a set of well-lit and cor­rectly exposed pho­tographs. Mak­ing it work with a crappy snap­shot is almost impos­si­ble. That’s espe­cially the case when the photo was made with a flash on the cam­era pointed straight at the sub­ject, which will elim­i­nate all trace of dimen­sion­al­ity and make every­thing look flat.

So I want you now to make these two promises to yourself:

I solemnly swear that, if pre­sented with a good snap­shot, taken with­out a flash, and asked to paint a por­trait from it, I will not com­ply unless offered really impres­sive amounts of cash or threat­ened with seri­ous emo­tional black­mail by a fam­ily mem­ber whom I know to be crazy enough to con­vince my mom to stop speak­ing to me for a year.

I solemnly swear that, if pre­sented with a bad snap­shot, or any snap­shot taken with a flash, it would take a cred­i­ble threat of death to me, a loved one, or a fam­ily pet in order to get me to try to do some­thing with it.

Now you’re ready for when your Aunt Stephanie finds out that you are an artist and wants free por­traits of the whole fam­ily. Leave it to Chi­nese sweat­shop artists to attempt “gen­uine oil paint­ings made with artist-grade mate­ri­als” using only crappy snap­shots. You owe it to your­self and to the rest of us.

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The persistence of vision

3 January 2007 in painting, personal by David | 3 comments

With paint­ing in my life I have ver­bal and non­ver­bal lan­guage I can use to describe and think about visual things. I can lay awake at night and con­sider the things I saw that day, reflect­ing on their shape, their color, and how they existed in space. I can think about what I saw and how it made me feel, and why. The more I paint, the more I see, and the more the sen­sa­tion of vision per­sists beyond the moment.

Here are some things I would prob­a­bly never have noticed if I were not a painter:

Morn­ing light fil­tered through white translu­cent curtains.

The color of shadow.

The shape of fingers.

The way the sky is one blue below a cloud layer and another blue above it.

How the light looks with my head under the covers.

The way the color of a sun­set changes, rad­i­cally, about every five minutes.

The many col­ors that white objects possess.

The gra­da­tion in the hue of my infant son’s irises.

I some­times look at a sky and think, “that’s a water­color sky,” or “that’s an oil paint­ing sky.” I can’t quite explain what the dif­fer­ence is, but to me it is clear.

I’ve encoun­tered peo­ple who have learned to appre­ci­ate paint­ings, but they don’t—they can’t—understand them the way a painter does, any more than some­one who attends the bal­let can under­stand dance as inti­mately as a dancer. For the under­stand­ing that I am start­ing to develop, I am deeply grateful.

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Just say no to “scumble”

1 January 2007 in art technique, color, painting by David | 1 comment

The word “scum­ble” is an art term that has a lot of mean­ings. Some­times, it means thin glaze with a mix­ture that con­tains white. Some­times it means paint­ing with a dry brush using a bro­ken color effect. Some­times it means other things. In fact, it means so many things that it really doesn’t mean any­thing at all unless you define what you are try­ing to say each time you use it.

Let’s just get rid of it. It causes more con­fu­sion than it’s worth. It should be replaced with terms like “glaze,” “bro­ken color,” “dry­brush,” and “velatura,” which actu­ally do have coher­ent meanings.

Just say no.

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Limited palettes

27 December 2006 in art materials, color, painting by David | No comments

One way to put together a palette is to delib­er­ately use just a few col­ors of paint. A lim­ited palette is any group of six or fewer paints (plus white) cho­sen for how har­mo­niously they mix with each other, as opposed to a color the­ory palette selected for a wide range of hues and the high­est pos­si­ble chroma. Lim­ited palettes often focus on earth col­ors, since they har­mo­nize well together. They usu­ally include paints from the warm side and the cool side of the hue cir­cle (although the cool may just be a black) and often make use of mix­ing complements.

Any small group­ing of paint col­ors will do. Here are a few use­ful lim­ited palettes:

  • Burnt sienna and ultra­ma­rine blue.
  • Raw sienna and ultra­ma­rine blue.
  • Yel­low ochre, alizarin crim­son, and black.
  • Yel­low ochre, alizarin crim­son, burnt umber, and black.
  • Yel­low ochre, alizarin crim­son, ultra­ma­rine blue, burnt sienna, and black.
  • Cad­mium red and black.
  • Black (and white).
  • Black and burnt umber (and white).

(Note that you can sub­sti­tute a more light­fast pig­ment for alizarin crim­son, such as pyrol ruby.)

As you can see, with these palettes there are hues and chro­mas that can’t be mixed, only sug­gested. Often, by using warm/cool con­trasts, you can cre­ate the impres­sion of col­ors that aren’t actu­ally there. The clas­sic exam­ple is cre­at­ing the illu­sion of bright blue eyes using only a mixed grey from black and white, by plac­ing warm yel­lows, reds, and oranges nearby. Many mas­ter fig­ure painters jux­ta­pose warm flesh tones with col­ors that look cool, but are actu­ally warm/neutral. In doing so they often make delib­er­ate use of a very lim­ited set of paints. Because you are using so few col­ors, you become inti­mately famil­iar with how each of your few paints mixes with each of the oth­ers, and how var­i­ous mix­tures work when set against each other.

The less­ened range of hue and chroma that are char­ac­ter­is­tic of a lim­ited palette cre­ate a sense of har­mony. Each part of the paint­ing is con­sis­tent with every other part, and a group of paint­ings made with the same lim­ited set of col­ors makes a series that is obvi­ously related. It is harder to achieve real­ism with a lim­ited palette, but once you are com­fort­able with a cer­tain set of col­ors it can be sur­pris­ing how sel­dom that seems like a seri­ous limitation.

When select­ing the par­tic­u­lar paints to use, be aware that not all “raw sien­nas” are the same. Paints labeled iden­ti­cally by dif­fer­ent man­u­fac­tur­ers can have rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent mas­stone, under­tone, color mix­ing, trans­parency, or other char­ac­ter­is­tics. That is par­tic­u­larly true with earth col­ors, which are often really syn­thetic oxides these days. So if you get used to hav­ing ultra­ma­rine blue and burnt sienna work beau­ti­fully together, you may find that if you switch brands (or even get a dif­fer­ent batch) that won­der­ful bal­ance of color isn’t quite so per­fect. If you find a per­fect paint, you may want to get an extra cou­ple of tubes, because that per­fec­tion may not be avail­able forever.

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Doak’s cristallo medium

23 December 2006 in art materials, art suppliers, oil painting, painting by David | 5 comments

So I called up Robert Doak over the Sum­mer to order some paint. As he does, he asked me about how I paint and started sug­gest­ing addi­tional things for me to buy (he’s a very good sales­man). One of the things he pushed was his new medium, “cristallo.” At $12 USD for a 40 ml tube I decided to splurge and pick some up.

Mr. Doak says that the pri­mary ingre­di­ents in cristallo are leaded glass pow­der and sun-thickened wal­nut oil. It also con­tains small amounts of cold-pressed wal­nut oil, beeswax, and lead drier. It is based on recent research indi­cat­ing that 16th cen­tury Venet­ian painters added more pow­dered glass to their paint than was pre­vi­ously thought, although he makes no claim that this is the “redis­cov­ered” medium of Tit­ian, Gior­gione, and Tin­toretto. He sug­gests that it is best used by spread­ing it thinly onto the sur­face and paint­ing into it. He also sug­gests that it is a good replace­ment for var­nish on a dried paint­ing, but I am dubi­ous about that appli­ca­tion and have not tried it.

I’ve now painted with it, off and on, for a few months. It is a sort of thick, col­or­less fluid, about the con­sis­tency of ketchup. It is not sticky the way medi­ums con­tain­ing resins, bal­sams, or stand oil tend to be. It is easy to spread very thinly onto the paint­ing sur­face with a fin­ger (you can feel a slight gran­u­lar­ity from the glass pow­der, but it is barely per­cep­ti­ble) and it becomes more fluid as you move it around (i.e., it is some­what thixotropic). It is nice to paint on, pro­vid­ing a pleas­ant, slip­pery qual­ity to the paint­ing sur­face. Mixed into paint, it dilutes it slightly and gives it extra brusha­bil­ity. It doesn’t hold brush marks. It does not seem to markedly increase or decrease the dry­ing time of oil paint. So far, I like it. It does not make the paint mag­i­cally trans­par­ent or lumi­nous, but I didn’t expect it to.

If you do use cristallo or any other paint­ing medium, add only very small amounts to your paint—never more than 20% of paint vol­ume and prefer­ably much less than that.

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Just as good

21 December 2006 in art materials, painting by David | 3 comments

Peri­od­i­cally, I see a post on an inter­net art forum along the lines of “Why buy expen­sive medi­ums when left­over bacon grease works just as well? I’ve been using it since 1953 and I’ve had no prob­lems so far!” Peo­ple (espe­cially we Amer­i­cans) seem to have a strong desire to use the mate­ri­als we are famil­iar with, have left over from other activ­i­ties, or can get for a dol­lar less per gal­lon than an “equiv­a­lent” mate­r­ial at the art store. So you see artists using white house paint to prime their can­vases, cheap boiled oil from the hard­ware store as a paint­ing medium, cheap generic spray var­nish, and other sub­sti­tute materials.

I think that’s a false econ­omy. I believe that, in order for paint­ings to be thought of as valu­able, they should be made from fine mate­ri­als using excel­lent crafts­man­ship. Imag­ine if a maker of hand­made vio­lins thought that balsa wood was just as good as a good hard­wood, or that generic spray var­nish pro­duces just as good a fin­ish and tone as a prop­erly pre­pared resin var­nish. That would not be an “inno­v­a­tive” way to save money on violin-making sup­plies. Work­ing like that could pos­si­bly pro­duce a vio­lin that looks OK, and maybe it could even sound OK, but it would not be an object of craftsmanship.

I’m not an elit­ist. I have lim­ited money to spend on art mate­ri­als, too. I buy inex­pen­sive Venice tur­pen­tine from a tack shop instead of the costly stuff from the art store, because it seems to be the same stuff and is a lot cheaper. I make my own tra­di­tional gesso pan­els because I can’t afford to have the guys at Real Gesso make them for me (theirs are bet­ter than mine).

I under­stand the desire to come up with per­sonal solu­tions that feel more clever than the fancy stuff in the art store. But hard­ware store boiled lin­seed oil is junk. It’s made for tasks like pro­tect­ing the wooden han­dle of a gar­den­ing tool from the ele­ments, not for mak­ing per­ma­nent art­work. Adding a lit­tle bit of cheap oil (or left­over bacon grease) to your paint won’t make it explode. Paint­ing on latex house paint “gesso” may not cause notice­able prob­lems. The paint­ing may last long enough, under decent con­di­tions. And it is cer­tainly the case that most of us will never pro­duce a mas­ter­piece that will deserve to hang in a museum 200 years from now.

But I can’t make paint­ings that way. Using house paint, cheap boiled oil, or any other junk mate­r­ial makes me feel like a hack, not a crafts­man. Decent mate­ri­als are not that expen­sive. And while junk mate­ri­als may work out OK, they may well not, and they may cause a good paint­ing to fail pre­ma­turely. Plenty of 19th cen­tury painters dis­cov­ered that when they for­got the tra­di­tions of crafts­man­ship and just used what­ever seemed to work they often got paint­ings that didn’t last. While I some­times hear anec­do­tal sto­ries about any num­ber of weird mate­ri­als being used with “no prob­lems so far,” my own bias is to use qual­ity mate­ri­als from com­pa­nies I trust, not jury-rigged stuff that is “just as good.”

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