01-31-2020, 02:51 AM
If I use lines it's only to block in some proportion at the start, and soon after I paint over it. The goal of my paintings is to essentially match the visual impression and the closer I get to that in my mark making, the easier the process is. So yeah, in general it's just "mass drawing" rather than line drawing.
I use paint ground in linseed oil so it generally dries after a day, although it dries hard after like 3 days. You don't want to work over half-dried paint as it can cause tensions in the paint layers and it also causes what is painted over to sink-in.
Sorry I've neglected the thread. Been busy with other stuff so I haven't worked much on the still life, will get back to it tho.
I thought I'd make a post about something I'm very interested in and something I think is poorly understood, even by competent artists today, and that is paint consistency.
Now we're all aware that paint is a mixture of oil and pigment. We generally purchase our paint in tubes and if we want to change its consistency, we thin it down with oil, solvent or a mix of the two. Some artists are interested in certain complex mediums that change the feel of the paint, but the frame of reference is always the commercially available paint tube. Yes some people grind their own paints but in general, we use the paint tube as a frame of reference to paint consistency.
Now the assumption many artists make is that the paint in a tube is the "stiff" paint, and from that point artists are expected to thin it down to their preference. That assumption is in some ways incorrect from a historical point of view. Modern paint tubes are not designed to be at one end of the spectrum in terms of consistency, rather they are generally designed to be in the middle for the broadest appeal.
The average purchaser of a professional quality artists oil paint is not a professional artist. It's just someone who can afford the higher end paint. The amount of professional artists is proportionally very small and even in that group, the amount of artists in that want paint on the stiff side of the consistency spectrum is even smaller. This makes it very hard to find paints with a more traditional consistency. Old Holland is the closest but even then, to emulate many historical painting techniques, the paint needs to be yet stiffer.
Going back to the latter half of the 1800's where oil paints were being manufactured at a larger scale and put into tubes, many brands tried to appeal to the professional market as it was significant during that time. Even then, we can find in the writings of Charles Moreau-Vauthier that even then, manufacturers would frequently put too much oil into the paint tube. The stated reason was that a lot of artists liked softer paints but Moreau-Vauthier doesn't take this reason seriously and he points to the fact that paints with proportionally more oil in them have a longer shelf life than paints with less oil, allowing them to have larger stocks of their products without them going bad. That being said, the good professional range of oil colors during this time, was fairly stiff, more so than todays W&N paints for example.
My main point is that the standard for what the consistency of paint is has changed over time and this change in consistency has at times caused us to misunderstand historical art and painting practices. Take mediums for an example. Artists today are often very confused by mediums, should you use them? How much? these are reasonable questions because often the point of a medium doesn't make itself clear. The paint is already so soft you can emulate most fluid painting techniques, so why do we need medium? Well if we change our perspective and think that the paint artists in the past had were very stiff, and needed stiff bristle brushes to move this paste across the canvas, then medium starts to make more sense. It then becomes a very clear that if we want to broadly block in for example someone's coat in a portrait, we need to thin down the paint more to allow us to do so. This thought doesn't come up as much with modern paints because we don't have that absolute need for medium that used to exist.
Now of course many artists historically would use softer paint. Artists had their own preferred medium, sometimes even considered it a secret to be closely guarded. The point is that the paint that they chose to thin down, was very stiff. If we today were to try and emulate their practices by adding similar amounts of medium to our modern paints, we'd end up with a very fluid mess. This was an interesting thing to note when reading Speed's book where he says that the paints he purchases is too stiff to paint freely with and you often need medium. We then see artists like James Gurney being confused by this, suggesting the opposite that he finds paints to be too oily. This is a case of our reference points being different due to the changes in paint consistency.
We will also get visual clues that paints were historically stiffer. Take for example this Arkhipov painting https://i.pinimg.com/originals/47/ba/5d/...b53129.jpg
Notice how thickly it's painted yet the paint remains very tightly controlled. It's clearly all painted with a bristle brush yet it remains very thick. We will often find that painting with a bristle brushes on modern tubed paints, they are so aggressive that they cut right through the paint, causing the painting to be very thin. If however the stiffness of the paint matched the stiffness of the brush, bristle brushes can be used to create this type of a painting. It is very rare to see this look of brushwork in modern paintings, just because the materials are different. Another example is this Velazquez painting https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c...1zquez.jpg . This painting has a range of consistencies from very fluid in the darks to very stiff highlights. The stiff paint in the light passages allows the artists to model very soft tones while also preserving that sense of mass, as well as place very distinct marks on top for the highlights.
Now if you're like me, you like the look of older paintings and want to emulate some of this brushwork. What do we do? Well I first found a very good answer when translating some Russian Writings about Nicolai Fechin. Now Fechin used paint tubes however he'd always prepare the paints before he began working. What he'd do was to spread the paper out on an absorbent material and some of the oil would over time be sucked out of the paint, into the surface. This left him with a stiffer paint that he preferred to work with. We can do the same with our materials. Now, Fechin worked with paint that was moderately stiff already in the tube so he took this much further than most artists, but the idea works fine. You can use any kind of absorbent surface like cardboard, paper. I've been using coffee filters lately. I've found that to get a nice stiff paint, I've often had to blot off the oil two or three times by placing it on a fresh area of the coffee filter but it can vary depending on how long you let it sit and how much you spread it out. After about 10 minutes, the rate of absorption generally slows down and to make things go faster, you can then place it on a fresh area to blot off more. I've since found reference to this practice in many many different books from the 1800's.
All this is just to give a bit of context to understanding historical practices and materials. While many artists use medium, the paint they start with often effects how that medium interacts. A medium of 50/50 oil and turpentine acts very differently with stiff paint compared to paint that already has tons of oil mixed into it. I personally think it's good to expand your range in the type of marks you can make as an artist, rather than being limited by what paint manufacturers provide. I think many artists today have switched over to things like meyer's medium and very soft brushes just because of the consistency of commercial paints. It's like compensating for a problem rather that trying to remove the problem to begin with. Not to say that's bad, but it should be a choice made with knowing the full context.
Anyway, hope it maybe helps someone struggling with painting and trying to emulate historical techniques.
I use paint ground in linseed oil so it generally dries after a day, although it dries hard after like 3 days. You don't want to work over half-dried paint as it can cause tensions in the paint layers and it also causes what is painted over to sink-in.
Sorry I've neglected the thread. Been busy with other stuff so I haven't worked much on the still life, will get back to it tho.
I thought I'd make a post about something I'm very interested in and something I think is poorly understood, even by competent artists today, and that is paint consistency.
Now we're all aware that paint is a mixture of oil and pigment. We generally purchase our paint in tubes and if we want to change its consistency, we thin it down with oil, solvent or a mix of the two. Some artists are interested in certain complex mediums that change the feel of the paint, but the frame of reference is always the commercially available paint tube. Yes some people grind their own paints but in general, we use the paint tube as a frame of reference to paint consistency.
Now the assumption many artists make is that the paint in a tube is the "stiff" paint, and from that point artists are expected to thin it down to their preference. That assumption is in some ways incorrect from a historical point of view. Modern paint tubes are not designed to be at one end of the spectrum in terms of consistency, rather they are generally designed to be in the middle for the broadest appeal.
The average purchaser of a professional quality artists oil paint is not a professional artist. It's just someone who can afford the higher end paint. The amount of professional artists is proportionally very small and even in that group, the amount of artists in that want paint on the stiff side of the consistency spectrum is even smaller. This makes it very hard to find paints with a more traditional consistency. Old Holland is the closest but even then, to emulate many historical painting techniques, the paint needs to be yet stiffer.
Going back to the latter half of the 1800's where oil paints were being manufactured at a larger scale and put into tubes, many brands tried to appeal to the professional market as it was significant during that time. Even then, we can find in the writings of Charles Moreau-Vauthier that even then, manufacturers would frequently put too much oil into the paint tube. The stated reason was that a lot of artists liked softer paints but Moreau-Vauthier doesn't take this reason seriously and he points to the fact that paints with proportionally more oil in them have a longer shelf life than paints with less oil, allowing them to have larger stocks of their products without them going bad. That being said, the good professional range of oil colors during this time, was fairly stiff, more so than todays W&N paints for example.
My main point is that the standard for what the consistency of paint is has changed over time and this change in consistency has at times caused us to misunderstand historical art and painting practices. Take mediums for an example. Artists today are often very confused by mediums, should you use them? How much? these are reasonable questions because often the point of a medium doesn't make itself clear. The paint is already so soft you can emulate most fluid painting techniques, so why do we need medium? Well if we change our perspective and think that the paint artists in the past had were very stiff, and needed stiff bristle brushes to move this paste across the canvas, then medium starts to make more sense. It then becomes a very clear that if we want to broadly block in for example someone's coat in a portrait, we need to thin down the paint more to allow us to do so. This thought doesn't come up as much with modern paints because we don't have that absolute need for medium that used to exist.
Now of course many artists historically would use softer paint. Artists had their own preferred medium, sometimes even considered it a secret to be closely guarded. The point is that the paint that they chose to thin down, was very stiff. If we today were to try and emulate their practices by adding similar amounts of medium to our modern paints, we'd end up with a very fluid mess. This was an interesting thing to note when reading Speed's book where he says that the paints he purchases is too stiff to paint freely with and you often need medium. We then see artists like James Gurney being confused by this, suggesting the opposite that he finds paints to be too oily. This is a case of our reference points being different due to the changes in paint consistency.
We will also get visual clues that paints were historically stiffer. Take for example this Arkhipov painting https://i.pinimg.com/originals/47/ba/5d/...b53129.jpg
Notice how thickly it's painted yet the paint remains very tightly controlled. It's clearly all painted with a bristle brush yet it remains very thick. We will often find that painting with a bristle brushes on modern tubed paints, they are so aggressive that they cut right through the paint, causing the painting to be very thin. If however the stiffness of the paint matched the stiffness of the brush, bristle brushes can be used to create this type of a painting. It is very rare to see this look of brushwork in modern paintings, just because the materials are different. Another example is this Velazquez painting https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c...1zquez.jpg . This painting has a range of consistencies from very fluid in the darks to very stiff highlights. The stiff paint in the light passages allows the artists to model very soft tones while also preserving that sense of mass, as well as place very distinct marks on top for the highlights.
Now if you're like me, you like the look of older paintings and want to emulate some of this brushwork. What do we do? Well I first found a very good answer when translating some Russian Writings about Nicolai Fechin. Now Fechin used paint tubes however he'd always prepare the paints before he began working. What he'd do was to spread the paper out on an absorbent material and some of the oil would over time be sucked out of the paint, into the surface. This left him with a stiffer paint that he preferred to work with. We can do the same with our materials. Now, Fechin worked with paint that was moderately stiff already in the tube so he took this much further than most artists, but the idea works fine. You can use any kind of absorbent surface like cardboard, paper. I've been using coffee filters lately. I've found that to get a nice stiff paint, I've often had to blot off the oil two or three times by placing it on a fresh area of the coffee filter but it can vary depending on how long you let it sit and how much you spread it out. After about 10 minutes, the rate of absorption generally slows down and to make things go faster, you can then place it on a fresh area to blot off more. I've since found reference to this practice in many many different books from the 1800's.
All this is just to give a bit of context to understanding historical practices and materials. While many artists use medium, the paint they start with often effects how that medium interacts. A medium of 50/50 oil and turpentine acts very differently with stiff paint compared to paint that already has tons of oil mixed into it. I personally think it's good to expand your range in the type of marks you can make as an artist, rather than being limited by what paint manufacturers provide. I think many artists today have switched over to things like meyer's medium and very soft brushes just because of the consistency of commercial paints. It's like compensating for a problem rather that trying to remove the problem to begin with. Not to say that's bad, but it should be a choice made with knowing the full context.
Anyway, hope it maybe helps someone struggling with painting and trying to emulate historical techniques.
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