I've just spent an hour or so torturing myself: nothing perverted about it - much too old for that sort of thing - but painful nonetheless. I've been looking at oil demonstrations on YouTube. Now - they aren't all bad; just 90% of them: there was a quite good US painter named something or other Dee Beard: at least she was a real painter, even if she did think that ultramarine was a cool colour, and pthalo blue and Prussian blue warm ones... perhaps that was a slip of the tongue. Irritated at the time, I became so much more forgiving when I saw demos from every corner of the English-speaking world - the UK, Ireland, the US... Does this seem familiar to you? The use of black gesso (every time, black gesso) to cover the canvas first; then "liquid clear" over the darker parts, ie those bits that weren't painted in "liquid white"; then - again invariably, the palette: the liquid white; Titanium (so far, so good...); then Alizarin Crimson; "Cad Red" and "Cad Yellow"; Indian Yellow; Vandyke Brown; "Dark Sienna". The fan brush - no normal flats, other than the 2" variety, no rounds; the occasional filbert; a "liner brush"; and a painting knife reminiscent of the model Keith Fenwick uses in his watercolours and acrylics. And stippling - stippling, stippling ******* stippling! Brush strokes? Painting? Forget it! And then there's the patter: "we don't make mistakes, we just have happy accidents"; the need to make a "Swoosh!" sound when painting falling water; the soothing voices so reminiscent of That Man - Bob Ross. Years ago, when I was an official in the Labour Party, I encountered the Militant Tendency: well, God bless and keep them, some of them meant well, some of them didn't, but in the end they were a blessed nuisance and they all had the same method of speaking, especially when making speeches, down to identical hand gestures - many a pint of beer was spilt as a speaker made an expansive point, forgetting he was in the back room of a pub at the time. They all reflected their "training", to the extent that most of them were clones and didn't realize they were. Precisely the same thing happens with those who follow and popularize the William Alexander and Bob Ross techniques - Alexander started it all, Ross followed, and made a small fortune. The soft, modulated voices; the palette; the approach to the painting: it's always the same, and all their paintings LOOK the same..... They're probably the loveliest, kindest, most genuinely helpful people you could meet in a long month: make them your friends; buy them a pint; indulge their belief, if you will, that what they do is really painting at all - you might as well, because frankly they're unlikely to know any better. But whatever you do, the minute you see those trademark 2" brushes, the paint tubes adorned with the afro-haired image of the begetter of this horror, the fan brush coming for you, the Dark Sienna, the Cad Yellow, the Vandyke Brown, the Liquid White, the Liquid Clear, the Black gesso - just run. This is not tuition: this is the Invasion of the Body Snatchers - the sadness, the reason this bloody man and his methods drive me up the wall and cause me to bang on about them? One or two of these demonstrators, if they only weren't imprisoned in this incredibly restrictive system, could have been real painters. Instead, they're sales-people for something that has as much in common with painting as homeopathy has with medicine - and yet another very good reason for avoiding YouTube.... I was looking for anything interesting on oil painting, you see...... it wasn't a cheering experience. And yes, I know that many of us talk about Cad Yellow rather than Cadmium Yellow, and I know that a rigger can also be called a liner brush, and I know that it's perfectly possible to employ black gesso without being taken out and shot for treachery to Rembrandt but - EVERY TIME? These are the Jehovah's Witnesses of the art world - and they're coming for us, I tell you..... no one is safe..... I'm fitting new locks.