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Tag: oil painting

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Monday Morning Art School: the twenty-brushstroke painting

Mike Prairie’s twenty-brushstroke painting, in watercolor. He did the whole thing with a single 1.4″ dagger brush.

When I told my Composition and Brushwork students they were going to complete a finished work in twenty brushstrokes, they were skeptical. “You’re going to demo,” they insisted. Once they realized it was easier than it sounds, they—not to put too fine a point on it—nailed it.

Baby spruce in snow, a twenty brushstroke painting by me, in oils.

What will you learn?

The twenty-brushstroke painting is an exercise to loosen up our painting. It emphasizes simplicity, efficiency and intention. It means prioritizing the essential elements of composition. That teaches us to focus on what matters most.

Painting is always about strategy. Limiting the number of brushstrokes forces you to plan carefully before you start. You must think ahead about where each stroke will go, what color it will be, and how it contributes to the overall painting. This sharpens your ability to observe and distill a subject into its most important elements.

That is the basis of making bold, deliberate marks rather than overworking, hesitating or flailing around. Simplifying helps you see larger shapes and forms instead of getting mired in details. Since you can’t rely on detailed rendering, you are forced t focus on strong contrasts, values and color harmony to convey thoughts and feelings.

Lynda Mussen’s twenty-brushstroke painting in oils.

The twenty-brushstroke painting frees us from perfectionism and encourages economy of movement and painterly efficiency.

I do the twenty-brushstroke painting when I’m tapped out. It encourages me to experiment and take risks. It’s almost impossible to do a twenty-brushstroke painting that isn’t energetic.

How do you start?

First I draw… always. In this case, I wanted to understand a baby spruce’s needle and branch structure before I started to abstract shapes.

The twenty-brushstroke painting isn’t necessarily easier and faster to do than a conventional painting. It’s more thoughtful, less frenetic.

Start with a simple subject with clear shapes. A subject with defined forms is easiest, but with practice you can pare down most complex subjects into striking, recognizable shapes. Strong contrast helps.

For my class demos, I snapped a photo of a baby spruce. I drew a careful rendering of the wee tree in order to study how the limbs and needles branched out into space. After that, I drew a composition drawing, because if a picture doesn’t work in greyscale, it’s never going to work in color.

My twenty-brushstroke painting in watercolor.

Since I was painting a baby spruce in snow, a complementary scheme of blue and palest peach was an obvious starting point. I mixed sufficient paint so that I didn’t run out in mid-brushstroke. This is almost counterintuitive in watercolor, where people tend to mix smaller amounts with a brush, but it’s a great skill to develop. You can modulate and mingle the basic colors as you go.

I always test my watercolor strokes on a sheet of scrap paper to make sure the value, hue and chroma are exactly what I want. In oils, I can generally see the chromatic relationships on my palette. Knowing that value is the most important element of color, I get that straight first.

Each stroke is deliberate, with no dithering, correcting or overpainting. Brushstrokes should vary in length, texture, pressure and direction, but every one should have a purpose.

Work from the general to the specific. If you save details for the end, you may find you don’t want or need detail at all. In the watercolor painting above, I used one brush, a squirrel mop. In my oil painting, I used a #10 flat, a #6 bright, and a wee thing that was probably unnecessary. Mike Prairie used this dagger brush for his whole watercolor painting; I was so impressed I now want one myself.

Stop after each stroke to assess the overall balance and composition. Above all, resist the urge to overcomplicate matters.

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What makes a painting valuable?

The Late Bus, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435.00 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

“In the Rock-Paper-Scissors scheme of things, does acrylic ever top oil in terms of being taken seriously by collectors and curators?” Cheryl Shanahan asked me. It’s a great question. Although acrylics have been around since the middle of the last century (like me), they are not as commonly used as oils by the top tier of painters.

There are, of course, some acrylic painters who’ve been taken very seriously indeed: David Hockney, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, and Roy Lichtenstein, to name just a few. Acrylics lend themselves more to color field painting than they do to fine modeling. And until the advent of retarders, acrylics were difficult to use en plein air. Standard heavy-body acrylics are a constant struggle against premature drying when used outdoors.

Early Morning at Moon Lake, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

What makes a painting valuable?

The value of any work of art rests mostly in the name of its creator, a fact which has infuriated artists since the advent of art. Of course, if he or she is dead, the supply of new work has dried up, which drives prices up. That’s why I’m so tempted to fake my own death.

In 2019, an exhaustive study of the works of Joan MirĂł noted, “Miró’s works command higher prices, ceteris paribus *, when they were painted on canvas, were sold at Sotheby’s and in New York City or London, were traded during the evening session and depending on the period in which they had been painted, the size of their surface area, the number of words used to describe the respective lot and whether they had appeared in an art book. The prices of Miró’s paintings increased substantially between 2003 and 2008 and then declined, coinciding with the global financial crisis of 2009.” You can’t discount market manipulation when considering what makes a painting valuable.

Last light at Cobequid Bay, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

There are oil painters who will tell you there’s a hierarchy of mediums. “I had a watercolor friend who attended a plein air convention and she felt as if the oil painters were dismissive,” Cheryl said. “I listened to another oil painter friend on a podcast, and she was poo-pooing acrylics a bit. Her take was that galleries she was interested in were showing only oils.”

In my experience, many gallerists are already saddled with too many artists and will tell importuning artists the first thing that comes to mind to get rid of them. No gallery would reject a tempera painting by Andrew Wyeth, a watercolor by John Singer Sargent, or a house-paint drip painting by Jackson Pollock.

Having said that, there is some justification for the price differential between media. Some mediums are more time-consuming and the materials cost can be higher.

No Northern Lights Tonight, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $348 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Having taught many students in oils, acrylics, watercolor, and pastel, I have never been able to figure out what makes a person gravitate to a specific medium. They’re each capable of being either painterly or linear. But although I’m reasonably facile in them all, I gravitate to oils, followed by watercolors. It’s not that I think they’re better; in fact, if I were twenty again, I’d probably be using spray paint. It’s simply that it’s easiest to pick up the same kit day after day. If I flitted between them, I’d spend all my time setting up and none of it painting.

*That’s just a fancy way of saying, ‘everything else being equal.’

Mark next Friday on your calendar

Grand opening
Carol L. Douglas Gallery at Richards Hill
Friday, September 13, 5-7 PM
394 Commercial Street, Rockport, ME 04856

For more details, see here.

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Monday Morning Art School: miscible oils

Ever-Changing Camden Harbor, 24X36, oil on canvas, $3188 includes shipping and handling in continental US. This is one of the places I’ll be teaching in next month’s workshop.

Last week in my Color of Light class, the conversation turned to water-miscible oils.  I haven’t used them in years, and only to test them to see if they were a reasonable alternative to conventional oils (yes, although I don’t like their hand-feel). It’s your turn to teach me, and answer the question raised by my students: do miscible oils hold up over time?

Several of my students described problems with cracking, inner layers that didn’t cure, paint surfaces sticking to other things, or paint softening after varnishing with Krylon Kamar Varnish. “But the color is so much better when the painting is varnished,” said the person who’d used the Kamar.

Seafoam, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed, includes shipping and handling in continental US.

Since I’m a novice on the subject, I’m hoping that those of you with extensive experience with water-miscible oils can share that, good or bad

Kamar is, according to its material safety data sheet (MSDS), full of solvent. At least two of these—heptane and acetone—can dissolve oil paint, so I’m not shocked that Kamar could loosen up the surface of a painting. I’m no chemist and I’m not interested in reading MSDS for every spray varnish, but it makes sense that spray varnish needs plenty of solvent to be sprayable. On the other hand, I’ve used spray damar varnish on conventional oil paintings with no softening of the surface.

Apple Blossom Time, oil on archival canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US. Or, go see it at the Red Barn Gallery in Port Clyde this month.

Winsor & Newton makes a line of brush-on varnishes for their water-miscible oils, in matte, satin and gloss. I recommend my student try one of those.

Miscible oils are oil paints that are engineered to allow them to be thinned and cleaned up with water. The idea is to avoid using volatile organic compounds like turpentine, which are harmful when inhaled. A disclaimer, however: we haven’t been using turpentine as a solvent in this country in this century; it’s been replaced with odorless mineral spirits, or OMS. In a sense, miscible oils are fixing an obsolete problem.

The typical way of making oil and water mix is to add a surfactant. That’s how detergent works to remove oils from your clothes and dishes. For water-miscible oils, the end of the oil medium molecule is rejiggered to help it bind loosely to water molecules. The key here is loosely; you want the water to evaporate.

Sea Fog, 9X12, oil on archival canvasboard, $696 unframed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

The top-tier oil paint manufacturers, such as Gamblin or Michael Harding, do not offer miscible oils. Rather, they have solvent-free systems for working with regular oils. To me that indicates that miscible oils cannot yet be made to the highest standards of oil paints. In fact, the biggest complaint I hear about miscible oils is that their pigment load is lower. I don’t have enough experience to answer this with authority. Do you?

The issue of paintings not setting up or cracking is far more serious. This may be a simple fat-over-lean question. (I think that’s why my Kamar-using student’s paintings were dull and lifeless in the first place.) Fat-over-lean is every bit as true for miscible oils as it is for conventional oils.

In addition, miscible oils can crack is too much water is used, for the same reason that acrylics degrade if excessively diluted. There must be enough medium present to form a bond.

That’s all I know about the subject, so I’d love to hear from you painters with experience with miscible oils: do you like them? What problems have you had with them? Do you have paintings a decade or more old, and if so, how is the finish holding up?

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Drying sails at Camden harbor

Drying Sails, 9X12, oil on canvasboard, $869 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I have paintings in Camden for the first time in several years. They’re at Lone Pine Real Estate at 19 Elm Street, which is a very good location indeed. Rachael Umstead, the owner, is one of my church buddies and the mother of two very entertaining boys. She and her staff have made a great success of the office. It’s downright swank, something I could never manage in a million years.

Camden harbor is a terrific place to paint boats, and I love bringing students there. You can get a hot dog (or something fishy) and a soda at Harbor Dogs, which has been there for more than 50 years. Ambience? None, if what you’re looking for is fine dining. I’m more inclined to sit in the sun and watch the schooners, the little kids fishing, and the ducks.

That painting under way.

It’s always fun to paint at the harbor after a stiff rain. Sailors will be busy bailing out their dinghies and raising sails to dry. That creates a lovely geometry of docks, sail and other boats.

I painted Drying Sails with my pal BjĂśrn Runquist. We were practicing our chip shots for Camden on Canvas, although I no longer remember why we felt that was necessary. I do remember that I encouraged BjĂśrn to paint one of the schooners, who waited until he was well underway and then dropped her frills. Sorry, BjĂśrn.

Another day, another iteration of the same subject. (Private collection.)

Camden harbor is one of the must-paint places for my students at my July workshop, which is right around the corner. If you’re considering it, you want to register soon, since it’s both close and nearly filled up. My other workshops are listed below.) And if you’re coming from out of town, email me and I’ll give you some suggestions about where to stay—the Maine coast fills up fast during the summer months.

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Come to Maine for the sea air

Home Port, 18X24,, $2318 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I arrived at home, finally, at 5:43 yesterday evening. I’ve been gone for a long time and been to a lot of places—to Manchester, Liverpool, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Edinburgh, Fife, and then home through Reykjavik and Boston. From there I went to Albany, NY, where I saw my family and collected my dog.

“Why don’t you move to Vermont?” my daughter asked me. (She knows I won’t return to New York.) I’m extremely touched that my kids want me nearby, but I love my life here in Rockport.

When I was in Fife, I could feel my sinuses open with the sea air; I felt as if I were home again, for at least a few hours.

It was unbearably hot and humid on Wednesday in the Hudson Valley, reminding me powerfully of one reason I left New York. It’s just as cold in upstate New York as in Maine in the winter, but summers here are so much nicer. It’s that sea air, which moderates temperatures.

Yesterday morning, however, I hiked to a waterfall along Hannacroix Creek, where I let the dogs romp in the stream while I swatted mosquitoes. That reminded me of just how beautiful New York is. It’s a study in contrasts and always leaves me feeling conflicted.

Waterfall on Hannacroix Creek in Greene County, NY.

I arrived home to a beautiful thick fog and mizzle. It was 59° F. and I could feel my dry skin relax and ease back into its usual healthy state. If you want to escape the heat of summer, I recommend Maine. (And if you paint, you can take one of my workshops.) If you have allergies, sea air is a balm.

I like Home Port for its view, but I also like its neighbor, a lovely lady whose house has figured in several of my paintings, including Forsythia at Three Chimneys. She’s what I aspire to be at her age: self-reliant and forthright.

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Am I getting a little homesick?

Downtown Rockport, 14X18, oil on archival canvasboard, framed, $1594 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I treasure the time I get to spend with my friend Martha. Since she moved to Scotland it takes planning and effort to see her. And although we have great hiking trails in the US, there aren’t little pubs and hostelries along the way. I’m too old to carry my world on my back. Until I get a burro, my long hikes are going to be in other countries.

As much fun as this trip has been, however, I’m starting to feel a little homesick. This is the downtown block of my home village on the Maine coast.

I painted this with Ken DeWaard. Like everyone else, I can sometimes convince myself I can buy my way into better brushwork (or color, or texture, or whatever). This is, of course, a snare and a delusion.

I admire Ken’s brushwork, so I decided I decided I’d see what he was using for brushes. Sadly, it was the same composite of new and old, pristine and slightly-sticky that was in my own kit. There are no silver bullets. (And nor is my brushwork so terrible; we just want what the other guy has.)

“What is that arc in the water?” my husband asked. It’s the rooster-tail of a lobster boat coming in fast.  That pegs the time as early afternoon.

I’ve been in Britain on another lovely, long, blister-inducing hike. I’ve turned my phone off and while I’m gone, Laura will be running the office. Just email me as usual if you have questions or problems registering for a class or workshop. (Who am I kidding? She fixes all that stuff anyway.)

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Monday Morning Art School: This is a post about watching paint dry

Chemistry—which I took fifty years ago—was my worst subject, and now I spend much of my time thinking about it. Life always gets the last laugh.

“How long does oil paint take to dry?” is one of the most frequent questions I’m asked. I made this video to answer the question. It’s part of The Heart of the Painting, step six of Seven Protocols for Oil Painters.

For those of you playing along at home, I recorded the video for step seven (about final finishes and flourishes) before I left for Britain. Laura is editing it right now. When it’s done, you’ll be able to learn to paint step-by-step at your own pace and you’ll no longer need me.

I plan to edit this material into book form when I’m done. No ‘how to paint’ book can possibly be as complete as these interactive courses, but a book is easier to curl up with.

Victoria Street, 16X20, oil on linen in a hard maple frame, $2029 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

So, how long does oil paint take to dry?

New painters want to know if they must let their paint dry between layers. It’s not necessary if you adhere scrupulously to the ‘fat over lean’ rule. Keep those bottom layers thin and you can paint right into them.

Paint is a simple material, just pigment particles suspended in a binder. So why do some paintings break down? Much of that is down to experimenting with additives. Laying new materials in a pool of drying oils is a recipe for long-term decay. Our museums are full of 20th century paintings with premature cracking. In oil painting, conservative skepticism is sensible.

https://www.watch-me-paint.com/product/midnight-at-the-wood-lot/Midnight at the Wood Lot, oil on archival canvasboard, $1449.00 framed includes shipping and handling within continental US.

Ignoring the ‘fat over lean’ rule is another cause of failed, cracking paintings. The most common solvent today is odorless mineral spirits (OMS) which breaks down the oil and then evaporates. In the bottom layer, that can leave a touch-hard finish in as little as half an hour. That surface can easily be broken if you need to edit. However, in the squishy top layers, OMS can wreck your painting.

I wish someone had told me this when I was younger. I struggled with paintings that looked great when wet but grey when dry, and which aged terribly even in the short time I knew them.

Oil paints don’t dry, they absorb oxygen from the air to harden. What’s oxidizing isn’t the pigment but the oil between the pigment particles. Different pigments have different particle sizes, so some colors dry faster than others. I’ve outlined the dry times in the video, but the most important one to remember is titanium white, which is a slow dryer. That’s one reason it doesn’t belong in your grisaille.

The ‘fat’ in paint is siccative oil, which in most cases is linseed oil. It’s so harmless it’s edible. The downside of linseed oil is its tendency to yellow over time, so other oils, like walnut or safflower, have been substituted. They, sadly, are more prone to cracking. It’s an imperfect world, isn’t it?

Alkyd paints and mediums are made from oil-modified resin treated with alcohol and acid. Their main advantage is their dry time. They can give you a touch-dry surface in 24 hours. You can use an alkyd medium with traditional oil paint. The granddaddy of these was Winsor & Newton’s Liquin, developed in the 1960s. In general, alkyd resin doesn’t hold as much pigment as traditional oils do. I don’t use them because I generally seek a slower dry time, and I’m put off by the smell.

Stone Wall, Salt Marshes, 14×18, $1594 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

How long does oil paint take to dry? It depends on many factors, but as long as you follow the ‘fat over lean’ rule, it’s not important.

I’m in Britain on another lovely, long, blister-inducing hike. I’ve turned my phone off and while I’m gone, Laura will be running the office. Just email me as usual if you have questions or problems registering for a class or workshop. (Who am I kidding? She fixes all that stuff anyway.)

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Ravenous wolves

Ravenous Wolves, oil on canvas, 24X30, $3,478.00 framed includes shipping and handling in continental US.

I painted Ravenous Wolves, above, at a low point in my life. I was coming to grips with the clay feet of people I’d once respected. My mother had died after a long dance with Parkinson’s dementia. I was trying to find my place in a new church, after leaving another in disgust.

The image of ravening wolves is used in Matthew 7:15: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.”

However, I based this picture on Ezekiel 34, which uses the vulnerability of scattered sheep as a symbol of our own exposure: “…because my flock… has been plundered and has become food for all the wild animals, and because my shepherds did not search for my flock but cared for themselves rather than for my flock…”

The life of a shepherd during the Biblical era must have been rather taxing. The Bible mentions adders, asps, wild oxen, rhinoceros, bears, wild boars, crocodiles, jackals, hyenas, leopards, lions, scorpions, wild dogs, wolves and predatory birds. It’s no wonder that David was an ace with his slingshot.

I watched a pack of wolves lope across a meadow near the South Fork of the Shoshone River in Wyoming last week. They’re undeniably beautiful, but they’re also apex predators. They pose a danger to livestock and pets.

From the settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the modern era, there were wolf bounties in North America. That caused their near-extirpation. We’ve wisely stopped that, since it was both inhumane and foolish. However, to some degree the pendulum has swung hard toward romanticizing wolves. In 2010 a woman was attacked and killed by a wolf in Alaska, and wolves remain a real danger in Asia (which is why they’re a recurring motif in Russian art and literature.)

Of course, those numbers pale in comparison to attacks by domesticated dogs, which kill 30 to 50 people in the United States every year.

I don’t think you should take up wolf-hunting-for one thing, it’s illegal except in very limited areas. But we should recognize that wolves are not the furry, cute elder brother of the domesticated dog. They wouldn’t think twice about eating your baby if you were foolish enough to leave it outdoors. That’s why they are metaphors for danger in art and literature ranging from the Bible to Dr. Zhivago.

There was no reference material for this painting; it all came out of my mind. These are the paintings I love the best, although I’m sure there are all kinds of subconscious cues in them that would embarrass me if I understood them.

And, by the way, if you get past the wolves, you reach the sunny uplands where the flock are grazing. It’s almost like a video game, isn’t it?

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My love affair with tin-foil hats

Tin Foil Hat, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

I’ll be deleting any political comments. This was meant as a light-hearted reflection on the news media, not on any candidate.

My love affair with tin foil hats started 15 years ago when I went to Texas to see my buddy Laura. The Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints and their pedophile cult leader Warren Jeffs were very much in the news. Their apologists, including Oprah Winfrey, were painting a sympathetic picture of them (it would eventually be shattered by the evidence collected at YFZ Ranch). My friends and I decided to make tin-foil hats in response to the FLDS’ daily protestations of innocence.

I tend towards simple clothing choices, so I went with the classic folded sailor hat. Laura’s looked more like my crystal candy dish, and there was one like the old Dutch Boy mascot’s hair. Another looked like the hats worn by Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs, and there was a tin-foil visor. There was a prize, which I didn’t win, even though my technique was as impeccable as always.

Tin-foil hats are especially useful during election season. I was at my friend Jane Chapin’s house last week when the results of the first Republican primary came in. You’d have had to have been completely insulated from reality to have thought it would end any way other than how it did. The results had been predicted for months.

I’m a TV tenderfoot but I thought it would be fun to scan the major news channels for analysis. (It was -34° F., which meant our options for amusement were limited.) I suppose news anchors are trained to bloviate about anything, but the analysis generally ranged from the blindingly obvious to the out-and-out ridiculous.

Laura and her tin-foil hat that looks like my candy dish. That isn’t going to protect her from radio waves!

If that’s any sign of the tone of the upcoming election, we’ll all need tin-foil hats to make it through the next eleven months. I’d recommend buying this one. It’s more durable than the Reynolds Wrap model, so you can reuse it every election season.

I started this painting as an exercise in reflections, but each time a public figure says or does something preposterous, I make it my Facebook profile picture.

I think this is one of the best things I’ve ever painted, and that’s not just because of its enduring social relevance. The reflections and color structure are strong, as is the paint handling.

I’ll leave it to you to figure out what the compass in the bottom right corner means.

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Midsummer

Midsummer, 24X36, oil on canvas, $3,188 includes shipping and handling in continental US.

“I really like that painting you did of the flat houses.”

“What flat houses?” I asked, perplexed. I was envisioning the architectural equivalent of Flat Stanley, the children’s book series.

It turned out that she meant Midsummer, above, and she was referring to the paint handling, not the drafting.

I painted this during a residency through Parrsboro Creative. The view overlooks the general store at Port Greville, Nova Scotia. To access it, I drove up a side road and painted from the edge of the escarpment, just past a very nice lady’s lawn.

This escarpment roughly parallels the shore of the Bay of Fundy. In places it’s gradual, and in other places it’s a steep, raw scarp.

In Maine, our cliff edges are made of granite, so I was totally unprepared for the edge of crumbly red sand to drop out from under me. My fall was stopped by a thicket of alders growing on a ledge about ten feet down.

I landed upside down but unhurt. After I turned myself around, I gathered my tools and threw them back up over the brink. Then I figured out how to climb back up to my easel.

It’s all in the drawing, even in plein air.

Cumberland County, Nova Scota is full of this crumbly soft red sandstone-and-soil mixture. It’s unstable, which makes rock-climbing risky. At Cap d’Or, the cliffs are a few hundred feet tall, but you wouldn’t be long for this world even if you miraculously survived the fall; there’s a wicked riptide. Every major storm causes erosion, so it’s a constantly-shifting shoreline. That in turn reveals a new cache of fossils, minerals and gemstones after every weather event; the area is world-famous for fossils.

These are also the highest tides in the world. I visited Joggins Fossil Cliffs to walk on the beach and perhaps paint. I’d arrived at the wrong hour. There’s a narrow window of time where you can be at sea-level; the tide rises so fast that it will cut off your escape.

These double-bay houses, so typical in Britain and the Canadian Maritimes, are not common here in the US; however, there are some here in Maine. We also have old-fashioned general stores like Dad’s Country Market, towards the left in my painting.

This painting took two full days to complete. The first was spent in drawing out the architecture.

“Draw slow, paint fast,” a student once told me. It’s an excellent motto, because the more time one spends on the drawing, the less floundering one does in the painting.

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