What’s it like, painting with oil paints?
There is nothing like painting with oil paints…and it is especially wonderful if you have a love of butter and all things rich and creamy. Now, I just heard a few of you protest because you are water-based painters and have issues with fat. Not me! I have a love affair going on with full-fat products and I guess it shows. If oil paints were foods, I’d eat them! Their texture, color, smell and consistency are so enticing and luscious they just beg to be consumed by the sensuous artist.
Road To Alfonsinas Sea of Cortez, oils on canvas
Painting with oil paints is…indescribable until you try it. Oh, I can go on about how smooth and silky the oil paint feels when too much is used and the brush eagerly slips over the canvas texture in a rush only to offer resistance in the end as dry brush meets dry canvas. Or, I can tell you that the visual pleasure it offers, as colors willingly blend into beautiful tints, tones and shades is akin to watching a spectacular sunset evolve. Even the smell of paint is unique with hints of Greek Retsina wine and pressed linseed oil.
Some brands of oil paint are better than others. Take food as an example; we know which ones are better for us when confronted with choices like GMO, organic and conventionally grown foods, gourmet and fast foods and unprocessed foods like organic grassfed raw milk cheese from NZ and over processed foods like ultra pasteurized, homogenized milk based Velveeta in a can. The same is true in the manufacturing of oil paints. There are expensive oil paints that are made in small batches of professional grade oil paints that have pure, high-end or rare ingredients in them that certain artists would prostitute themselves for. Professional grade colors have excellent permanence. On the opposite end there are low grade student paints meant for experimenting with. These paints have very little pigment in them, are inflated with fillers and stabilizers and the oils have been hydrogenated to expand them. These paints might fade over time, flake, chip, stretch, crumble or have almost no permanence. Somewhere in the middle is a happy medium, pun fully intended.
Fillers, binders and such make it difficult to move paint on a canvas. These paint ingredients make it necessary to use large quantities of painting medium to make the paints more pliable. Of course, some impasto painters –those who love and strive to achieve generous amounts of texture on their canvas prefer “stiff” paints. The Realist painter in me loves a smooth brush stroke produced by a silky sable brush on a fine textured canvas. And for the record, old paints that have dried out and oxidized will be just as nasty to work with as cheap paints.
May I recommend you try painting with oil paints or if you are already an oil painter, treat yourself to a really decadent tube of paint such as a cold pressed and ground paint with pure Earth mineral by Old Holland.
What’s your favorite oil paint brand?
Do you ever get traditional and make your own oil paint from grounds? Yumm….
Comments
Leave a Reply
