A paintbrush is a tool. With use, it will wear down. The finest tip, with use, soon becomes dull. Alas . . .

four brushes, new and used

But there are positive sides to wear as well. We can think of the normal wear on the tips of the brushes as a shaping process, producing a new form of brush. As the photo above shows, four brushes of the same type will, with use, become distinct tools, each suited to a somewhat different job. All of these red sable brushes are fully functional, because I have kept them clean: the ferrules are not fused with dried paint, so hair still retains flexibility. More »

brush "dirty" with black oil paint

Making a brush dirty is easy. Here I dabbed this brush in black oil paint up to the ferrule.

To clean it, I first used a paper towel. Then I dabbed the brush once into a pool of oil on the palette paper. I moved to another clean and dry area of the paper and dabbed the brush against the paper, letting the oil work the pigment out of the brush (marked 1 on photo). The I repeat the process, paper towel and a new drab of clean oil. We can see (2 on photo) that the oil is coming off cleaner already.

seven dabs of oil to clean the brush

Repeating the process a total of seven times, I have a clean brush with very little wasted oil (seven drops is not much). It was also fast. Don’t be fooled by the dark tips of the hairs on this synthetic brush. This brush is really clean, ready to be used with white, if I wanted to do that.

various brushes stored in linseed oil

. . . have a plate of tin or lead which is one finger deep all around, like a lamp; and keep it half full of oil, and keep your brushes in it when idle, so that they will not dry up.
–Cennino Cennini, 14th century

I use a plastic painting tray from the hardware store, which has the advantage over the dish Cennino describes in that the brush handles remain clean because they are not submerged. I’ve seen a painting from the 15th century that shows the same design as depicted in the photo above, but with wood replacing plastic. At the top left of the tray I attached a dowel (a pencil) with sculpting wax on it for the brushes to rest on so that they don’t slide down and resting against the bottom. I keep the whole tray in a light-proof box to keep it clean and reduce the drying of the oil inside.

I am storing about thirty-five brushes in this tray. Red sables with short (or rather, normal) handles are at the lower layer, resting directly on the pencil with the wax. These brushes are not visible in the photo. On top of these I put longer-handled brushes, some with fine red sable hair, others with synthetic hair. There are also hogs’ bristle brushes. These are stiffer than the others, and I let them rest against the bottom of the tray. More »

Turpentine in a warm studio in winter. Yuck. Turpentine, even a small amount, gives me this pinched feeling, a bit of a dizzy feeling. Then a headache. Do I have an allergy to turpentine, or is this just a normal reaction?

I was happy when, several years ago, I was able to sidestep the whole turpentine problem. I learned, through reading translations of old manuscripts, and looking at paintings, that the old masters used a different approach to cleaning and storing their brushes. They used linseed oil, the same oil they painted with. You might even say that the use of turpentine is a modern aberration. It’s not necessary for great oil painting, it makes a lot of things more difficult and inconvenient. More »

a broken bicycle, a damaged chair, and a mediocre painting; none will last

As I see it, there are three aspects to the issue.

The first is the quality of the materials themselves. Is the painting on high-quality linen, or on a self-destructive material like masonite? Are the pigments lightfast, or will they fade rapidly with daylight? More »

Detail from funeral pyre scene on an Attic Geometric krater, second half of 8th century BC

Man being eaten by a crocodile, first half of 21st century AD

The ceramic painting above I borrowed from Victor Bryant’s excellent ceramics website. The drawing on paper is by Fran, who is almost five years old.

The images are similar in that they both depict narrative scenes, and both make use of simple geometric shapes. The vase painting probably represents top quality artwork of its era, making use of a consistent representational system which covers this large vase and many others (presumably painted by many different adults working over many years). The children’s drawing is a one-of-a-kind sketch. More »

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
–Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Ernest

Has art dealer Edward Winkleman become a cultural icon? If so, it seems we should pay attention to what he is saying . . .

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Leslie Holt has broken a sort of taboo over at Art & Perception with her political artwork — reinterpretations of works by old masters. Art & Perception had become something of a “soft art” site lately. If art is to be relevant today, it has to take on the tough issues. Leslie says she has more in the same vein. I’m very curious to see the rest . . .

Hanneke did a post about children’s art on Art & Perception today, comparing drawings of people by children of different ages. I set up a site for art by kids — Child and Art — to hold this material, because Art & Perception also covers grownup themes. On Child and Art, there are only selected outgoing links, so that kid surfers will not run in to trouble — at least as quickly as on the open web.

Carina Fernhout painted this larger-than-life meta self-portrait as Eve; to the right is Adam, to the left, her daughter.

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By Hanneke van Oosterhout

This is what I call my “Queens day” picture. More »

Red gauche on paper

Let’s for a moment accept the proposition that children artists can be considered “real artists.” What an odd type of artist a child makes, if you think about it. What a short career a child has as an artist, always in transition. Who could be worse at writing an artist’s statement than a child? More »

By Hanneke van Oosterhout

Many people think of underpainting as a working in monochrome — either in grays, or browns. Artists of the past like Jan van Eyck used very colorful underpaintings. The usefulness of this I see in my painting of grapes.

I was painting these grapes from some dark purple-blue grapes in my studio. I made the underpainting much more bright, and warm, than real grapes, as you can see in the picture above.

When the first layer of oil paint was dry, I began overpainting, putting darker shadows over the grapes to make the colors more realistic, darker and cooler, as you can see above.

Here I have gone further with overpainting in another session. Now the grapes have a realistic color, but the brightness of the underpainting color shows through and gives life to the colors. If I had started with dark gray grapes, instead of a colorful underpainting, the colors would be dead when I did the overpainting. This this picture is not quite finished in the cloth. Here is where I left it yesterday afternoon.

Any suggestions?

(detail requested by Steve)

. . .

UPDATE

I’ve gone further with this painting. I’ve been thinking a lot about your suggestions from last time while I was painting. What do I need to do to finish the picture? Any suggestions? For reference, the cloth is about 25 cm wide at its widest point. Here are some details of the picture: More »

All war is deception.
–Sun Tzu

The most famous and perhaps most studied book on military conflict is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (6th century BC). The metaphoric title is in fact a translator’s conceit (the literal title is “Sun Tzu’s Military Strategy”), but the translated title is irrevocably tied to the book (in Western minds at least). The persistence of the book’s relevance with its adopted title raises the question, can one legitimately, or at least “profitably,” think of war as art? More »