Painting in Oils without any solvent

You might know that I've told people who have problems with Turps and Low Odour Thinners etc that you don't HAVE to use solvents at all with oil paint (if you're using painting knives, you don't need mediums/added oils either). But what I might not have made clear is that I do sometimes employ a bit of Turpentine, or Liquin, or W & N Oil Painting Medium. This, though, struck me as a bit of a cheat: it's all very well saying it can be done, I thought - but how about really doing it? So I am starting a painting on panel with no Turps, no LOTs, no Liquin - although Liquin isn't a solvent anyway - just Linseed Oil, and perhaps a bit of stand oil towards the end, we'll see. I know it can be done, indeed I've done it before, but this time I'm forbidding myself to go anywhere near solvents of any kind: and I won't use it for cleaning my brushes either. If I tell you, you see, I shall have no means of backsliding - unless of course I simply lie; and such is not the Jones Way. So hold yourselves in readiness. Rather this, I thought, than take refuge in Water miscible oils - I'm not going to preach against them, but I'm not going to use them, either.

Morning, Alans - well, afternoon. Starting with Alan O, yes you can certainly use Walnut Oil, and one of the brands of Cremnitz White is ground in it (vastly expensive, but there we are). Linseed is said to be better for the bulk of the painting, because it makes a stronger bond with the paint, and the recommendation from the scientists is that you should probably use Walnut in upper layers of the painting. The old boys tended to use different oils and solvents, plus resins, in different parts of their paintings, to achieve different results - not much good comparing modern techniques to theirs though unless we're using similar materials. Whatever we do, they won't be identical - but they would always have used lead whites, to start with, which is now harder to get. Alan B - you make me nervous! I'm in the very early stages at this point - a difference I've noticed, and I'm using little oil at this point, is that a) it takes a little longer to become surface-dry, as you'd expect, and b) it's not sinking in as a solvent/paint mix would do. Though this could be the paint I'm using as well - umbers seem to sink in whatever you use.

I did say I wasn't going to preach against water miscible oils, but then you have asked ..... I have used them; the brand I used was Artisan, and I've also used Grumbacher (don't know where you'd get the latter now, I've not seen them about lately). Both were student quality paints - that's not a problem in itself, and there are other brands about now anyway. But the question for me isn't why not use them, but rather why use them? I don't see a good reason to, because a) their long-term stability may be fine, or may not: we don't yet know, they've not been around long enough; b) you don't need to use Turps or White spirit with regular oils anyway - this is one of the points of my present enterprise, to prove that; c) you'll be using chemicals of various kinds if you paint in oils anyway, just modified in the case of water miscibles to be compatible with water as a medium; d) they are under-pigmented by comparison to artists' quality/professional quality oils, as their cost alone bears witness - they may be no worse than, say, Winton or Georgian, but that's not much of a recommendation. The one thing that stands in their favour is ease of clean-up - but that's no recommendation either: I don't buy paint because it's easy to clean off, but because it will work, or won't, to achieve whatever I happen to be capable of; cleaning up, in other words, is very much a secondary factor. As it happens, a friend of mine, Murray Ince, is writing an article or two on Artisan oils - well, water-miscible oils, I'm not sure if he still uses only Artisan - in an upcoming Leisure Painter. We agree to disagree on them - he recommends them. I don't. But the choice is yours.

There isn't any problem (that we're so far aware of) in combining water miscible oils with regular oils, other than that, obviously, they won't work as they were intended to - they'll work as ordinary oil paints. I use a few, now and then. But never with water. You could of course argue that problems that don't appear in one lifetime aren't really problems at all - except that no art conservator or museum takes that view. Read Murray's article(s) when they come out, if you want to use them. I am not here to advise against their use - I just won't recommend them, that's all.

Well now, at the risk of incurring wrath .... Let's get the good bit over first: the range of colours now available in the Artisan and other ranges is a lot better than it used to be: the cadmiums are actual cadmiums; I don't know about the Cobalt blue, because I've not looked; will do so. I remain puzzled though - presumably the colours go through an extra treatment to modify them for use with water - why then are they cheaper than their equivalent in the regular oil paint ranges? Is this why they are, in my experience of them, so much more inclined to pastel tones than regular artist-quality oils? The downsides for me are: I don't like the feel on the brush - what our presently absent colleague Martin Kinnear of the Norfolk School of Painting called the 'rheology'. The paint is softer - for the most part - than I like, and too slick. There are bound to be differences between brands, though. I have concerns about the long term, not because I can think of any particular reason why they shouldn't last, but just because they've not been around for long enough for us to be able to compare them: and of course, you can say that about ANY new paint, including acrylics. They don't have the limited range that they used to have, but even so I'm a heavy user of earth colours, iron oxides and synthetic oxides - I want my Mars Violet Deep, Mars Orange, Mars Red. (I'm not using black at the moment, and don't know why the water-miscible black would smell - I know Ivory Black can honk: it used to be made of boiled up bones, maybe that's why.) I suppose that at root, though, I just don't need them - I like using oil paint, I don't have too many problems with it, beyond the limitations of my own abilities, and well - I know what I like! Finally, it's not so much taking up a new paint, is it, as parting company with an old one - necessitating the purchase of a whole new set of paints, plus modified Linseed Oil and, if I used it, modified thinners - which by the way also make me somewhat suspicious of the long-term: we know what Linseed Oil and Stand Oil do, in their original formulation and treatment, because we've had centuries to find out. I have a sort of folk-memory here - of materials used to thin oil paint which we were assured would be problem-free at the time; and they weren't. Some of them - bitumen especially - caused paintings never to dry properly, and slurp off the canvas; and some, like Copal Oil medium, darkened the paint and the darkening couldn't be reversed. For similar reasons, I am not keen on Winsor & Newton's use of safflower oil in their paints - I don't know why they've done it, though presumably it's to limit yellowing, and I'm not at all sure it's a sound practice. It may be - but does it form the bond with paint that Linseed does? And you can't get lead whites with water-miscibles, but then they're virtually impossible to get anyway, thanks to the damn'-fool REACH regulations ... These are some of the reasons I don't use them: my mate Murray will give you the reasons TO use them, in LP or The Artist, I'm not sure which - can't remember the date he mentioned, but keep your eyes on the pre-publication news on this website. By the way - he's VERY good with them, and I say that without being bribed. (If anyone would like to bribe me, apply at the usual counter: I'm open all hours.)

Georgina - yes, Linseed oil is a medium, of course. What I'm trying to avoid isn't mediums, but solvents. It's not possible to avoid oil in oil paint, because - it's ground in oil. And in general, you have to add a bit more to some colours in order to make them move at all. Linseed oil plus Zest-it - I'm not entirely sure what's in Zest-it, but to the extent it's a solvent it'll work like Turpentine, probably. There's no particular problem with using a solvent if you want to - I'm trying to avoid them, more to prove it can be done than for any other reason. Use as little as possible of any medium, solvent, or combination of the two. Syd, more inclined to pastel by comparison with regular (high grade) oils is what I said; not that Artisan colours are pastel hues in themselves. The issue comes when you mix a paint with white - an intensely pigmented oil paint will take a lot of white (though in practice what you'd do is add the colour to the white rather than the other way around); a lesser pigmented paint will turn to a pastel shade with far less white (which you might consider an advantage, of course). Try using a Michael Harding Ultramarine against an Artisan Ultramarine and you'll see what I mean by the inclination of the latter to assume a pastel hue. It's not just water-miscible oils, either - the student grades of oil paint have the same characteristic: there's more filler in less expensive paint, and less pigment. Alan - I've not used Walnut Oil, but have some paint ground in it ... so I sort of have, but haven't ever added it to paint. Was Linseed oil used for cooking - dunno! Very strong flavour, I should think, and I'm not going to try it. Theoretically it could be - safflower oil certainly can. And is there genuine Turpentine - ah. Um. Well there's more than one kind of Turpentine, and I've forgotten the composition of it - I did read about it last year, but then I did a lot of things last year I've forgotten now. If you really want an answer to that, I'm going to have to go away and study it again - but there's certainly a product called Turpentine, and I have a small quantity left of Turps that was used by a restorer of antiques, which is good stuff but you'd want to wear a mask when using it; but as you will know, and obviously do, there's not a straightforward answer to that question because of the different ways it was distilled and obtained in the first place. You'll know about Oil of Spike, Venice Turpentine and so on - 'real' is a loaded word, isn't it? I shall have a look at this subject tomorrow, and refresh the memory. I like a little project to work on .....

Turps - yes, the 'real thing' is still available, and if it's labelled as Turpentine then that's what it should be. If it's petroleum distillate, you've been done - that covers mineral spirits, white spirit, Turps substitutes: they work well as solvents, but don't have the resinous quality of genuine Turpentine and so are less good for the paint (i.e. all they do is break it down). Trouble is, they're all toxic in greater or lesser degree, including real Turps - a serious problem for anyone with asthma or other breathing difficulties. I don't have such difficulties, but have had two attacks of bronchitis - it was after the last one that I started thinking about doing away with any solvents in my painting: and my current effort is coming along reasonably well without them. Alan Owen, I notice, always asks the hardest questions..... Now to investigate Zest-it..... Well, I just did: I can find no contraindications for Zest-it - it appears to be quite safe to mix with oil, without doing anything particular for the paint, but also nothing to cause harm so far as is yet known. So yet another answer for those who can't work with Turpentine or petroleum-based solvents.