WET INTO WET...

I am going to take this opportunity today to wax rapturous about the pure bliss of working with oil paint. When I lived in New Mexico I learned that they have an official state question, which is: "Red or Green?" It's what they ask you when you go out to eat there and it refers to what kind of chili concoction you want on your food. Among artists and art lovers, there is a commonly asked unofficial question which is: "Oil or Acrylic?" I am asked that question on a daily basis here at the Venice Beachwalk art show.

People usually act surprised when I say I work in oils...I guess because the majority of painters work in Acrylics these days. I use to use Acrylics myself, many years ago and was always a bit frustrated by them. They dry so quickly that there is almost no time to work with the paint. You end up with layers of paint that are, for the most part, separate from each other. Oils, on the other hand, stay wet and give you time to move them around, blend them together or wipe parts away. Often times people will say they would love to work in oils but they don't have the room....I usually just smile and point out the fact that I live and work in a 12 square foot home/studio. Granted, it helps if you are a naturally tidy and organized person. If you are one of those artists who sling paint around like Silly String at a Spring Break keg party and you end up with it all over yourself then yeh, maybe working with oils in a small space wouldn't work for you. Fortunately for me, I am one of those aforementioned naturally tidy and organized artists. I do my best to keep track of where the wet paint is so I don't end up spreading it all over everything I own. Once I finish working on a painting for the day, it goes into a pizza box where it lives until it is dry. I've mentioned in other posts that I use a medium called Liquin in my paint. It mixes with the oil paint right on the palette and has a number of wonderful qualities, one of which is that it makes the paint dry overnight. I have all day to work with the paint and blend and move it and don't have to wait weeks for it to dry.

LIQUIN with salt & lime

The Windsor & Newton Company, which makes Liquin, doesn't pay me to promote it, but they should, considering how much I encourage other painters to try it. It also works as a glazing medium, making colors more transparent the more you mix in. It enhances color and leaves a very tough surface after it dries. Blending color is a wonderful advantage over acrylic but I think what I like best about working in oils is working wet into wet. When you pull your brush from one color into another color, the color and value of the stroke changes as you go, creating a whole spectrum of spontaneous variation. With acrylics your brush stroke is going to be pretty much whatever color you have on your brush and that's all. Where's the magic in that? Interesting paintings are very much about subtle variations and spontaneous and unplanned results. Although in fact the results are not completely unplanned, as you more or less know what will happen, but there are subtleties you will be delightfully surprised by.

RAVEN by Barry Howard

And then there is that somewhat intangible aspect to oil paint vs. acrylic...and that is the indescribable and subtle difference in the look of the paint itself. Not to get too New-Agey but there is something about oil paint that can't adequately be expressed through verbal description...it's like the moment when a rainbow falls across your eye, infusing the world with color...it's like the whisper of dragonfly wings on your cheek...the fragrance of Gardinia on a tropical moonlit night....like being kissed on the forehead by the lips of the Goddess.

 

 

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