Painting with oil paint

[Paul Rhoads]

(The following is the continuation of my post on the Dutch Method thread, but 'off topic' :eek: there...)

Here is my 'secret' technique!

I mix up batches of paint, one palette-pile at a time, so if there is any left over it gets used the next day. I save it on my mixing glass, with a few drops of oil on top and under a sardine can. If several days go by I toss it. Sometimes, if I have a larger quantity (never very much!) of lead white to preserve, I'll seal the pile under a bit of tin foil. Basicly, however, I mix paint as I go. That way it is always fresh, and always how I want it.

LeFranc Bourgois (NOT 'Fragonard'!) 500gm large tubes are good--better than the small tubes--but even they do not have enough oil, so when I use them I mix in more (on the palette, or on the glass). The fundamental problem with tube paint is that if it had enough oil for painting it would separate in the tube, and the storage system--which is the whole point--is spoiled. There is a terrible tendancy for painters to accept tube-paint as the substance with which painting should be done. But the wonders of the oil medium are locked away from those making this mistake. Adding messes of varnish and so on does not really solve the problem.

To properly paint in oils with tube paint it is necessary to add pleanty of oil, until the paint is on the virge--or even beyond!--of no longer being able to stand in a pile. Then the only 'medium' needed is terps. Black oil does the jelly act even better than raw oil, but regular oil does it well enough. For oil paintings it is necessary to use oil, and pleanty of it!

[Alfredo]

Originally posted by Paul Rhoads:
(The following is the continuation of my post on the Dutch Method thread, but 'off topic' :eek: there...)

Here is my 'secret' technique!

To properly paint in oils with tube paint it is necessary to add pleanty of oil, until the paint is on the virge--or even beyond!--of no longer being able to stand in a pile. Then the only 'medium' needed is terps. Black oil does the jelly act even better than raw oil, but regular oil does it well enough. For oil paintings it is necessary to use oil, and pleanty of it!

If one wishes to paint in the manner of Paul Rhodes, that is. If one wishes to paint in the manner of Paul Rhodes, that is.

[Paul Rhoads]

:(
...is there no one, among pigment users, to endorce my remark? Am I alone in seeing a certain problem with tube paints? Why are others mixing their own colors when a responsible firm (Rublev springs to mind :rolleyes: ) is far more capable than even the most enthusiastic indvidual of properly grinding and etc. pigments into oil?

Why make one's own paint if not to get something different than what comes out of a tube, and what, for others, is that difference?

I mean the 'black to tradition' aesthetics of it are all very well, but if it's only for that...

[ 04. June 2008, 12:34: Message edited by: Paul Rhoads ]

[Paul Rhoads]

Alfredo,

now that you have come-clean with a few paintings, it seems--it is, of course, very difficult to judge by those images--that you favor--or naturally gravite to--a certain dryness of handling (I mean generally), which, it must be instantly said, seems to contribute to giving your pictures a beautiful matte quality, which suggests, as I mentioned, fresco--and gives them a quality of something painted on an old Mexican wall somewhere, by some anonymus poet of yor.

It seems you do not always paint exactly like this--that last male head with dominant grey coloring for example--but I would just mention that, generally speaking, true impasto effects are not a natural part of this sort of approche to paint handling. I mean, in that beautiful male head (you? the 6th image...but also the 7th), there seems to be some thicker paint--though it is impossible to really tell, as they are out of focus--but in any case this would not be the sort of thing I believe you are referring to in Rembrandt, n'est pas?

I don't want to venture too far, but there seem to be other consiquences. For example, the handling, --and thus on occation certain contours--are sometimes a bit 'sec', as we say in French--though you clearly love melted effects, and there are many beautiful ones!
This sort of thing, however, is dealt with quite naturally in a more gloppy technique.

...I won't proffer further unsollisted commentary before I see more...
:cool:
(that second image, the female portrait--the same woman as lower down?--is particularly appealing to me. Good for you to have done something so really beautiful!)