I had a very bad painting teacher (PATRICE!!) in art school. In addition to giving me a very undeserved C, she didn’t actually teach us much about painting as I recall. Just gave us assignments and set us loose with a medium the use of which I understood only just. And after a semester I didn’t know much more. The five-foot square self-portrait I was required to do for my final project is still in a closet at my parents’ place and some day is destined to be burned. So I broke up hard with oil paints, and also painting in general, around 1994.
Eventually I picked up watercolors on my own terms. I had never had a watercolor class (which were not even offered at my school) and absolutely no one could tell me I was doing it wrong and I could enjoy them as I saw fit. and that was all the painting I did for a long time. (Let me know if you want to see some of the weird stuff I was doing for nobody in the very early aughts.) Yet, even just a quick scroll through the posts on this brief records you will see that in the past year or so I picked up some major painting bug somewhere. I suppose we can blame the pandemic for it like everything else.
In September of 2020 I painted a bottle of Miller High Life in gouache, that led to a series of macrobrew can and bottle paintings. And altho I’d been doing some gouache work previous to that, that’s the thing that I think really set it off. Beer led inevitable to hot dogs. And feeling some limitation in gouache (likely more my lack of technique than anything) led to wanting something more opaque and layer-able than gouache ( which reactivates everytime you get it wet). And that’s how in April I ended up ordering a bunch of acrylic paints.
And that’s about where YouTube gets involved and radicalizes me. If you are looking for videos for acrylic painting they are definitely there, but you will find far, far more videos about oil painting. And then you will think about oil painting a lot based on the magical people doing things with it on the YT. And then your friend Melissa will get you interested in plein air painting (sorry for the fancy art talk, it’s literally just painting outside). And after you get a portable easel and have a go with acrylics you realize how fast they dry out in a breeze! Too fast! And you watch more videos to the point that you’re thinking well come on I can definitely do that. And then a box of oil paint shows up on your doorstep. YouTube, kids. Not even once.
And now we are in the present, (well, two days ago) when I opened up these new oil paints and made a small, quick oil sketch from a photo posted on the Sktchy app. Loose, without any preliminary drawing or actually much considering any particular approach and well it actually came out pretty good, for a first try in 25+(!!) years. Nothing earthshaking. The value range is real flat. Colors are not what I would hope, but hey first try. And I have all this paint so I have to talk up the small wins to keep myself at it.
Don’t worry, to make up for any hubris this little scrap of success might have spawned, two subsequent endeavors both went very south and you will never see them. But this is the price of a long withheld redemption.
Some further observations:
As I have not involved turpentine in any way, this all smells quite nice.
I still don’t know when this stuff every dries. I mean the one shown above is still wet wet. Not like sticky. I could scrape it off if I wanted. So that’s real different.
People doing oil painting demos on the Internet are all guilty of concealing far more than they reveal and I hate them.
There are more plans for painting outside a week from tomorrow. So we all have that to look forward to.