League tables of Acrylic brands - what a waste of time!

One of the artists' magazines - not, I'm happy to say, any from the stable which provides this website for us - has just published a passably useful article on acrylic paints, and listed, much less usefully, some of the brands in order of preference. What's the point of this? To be honest, what irritated me (and it's never hard to do that) was the inclusion of System 3 acrylics and the exclusion of Cryla, both made by Daler-Rowney. It's not that I value one over the other - although as I like to use heavy-bodied paint, I prefer Cryla - but that lists like this entirely leave out the artist factor: in other words, we choose our paint to suit our purpose, technique, requirements on the day. I frequently mix brands anyway - a bit of Winsor and Newton magenta featured in my most recent acrylic, plus Cryla Cobalt Blue, W&N Raw Sienna, and I think there's a bit of Chromacolour in there as well. The System 3 didn't feature this time, but did in the painting before that - they do a rather useful Sap Green. The consistency of the paint is often the most important thing, though sometimes a manufacturer will offer a colour which is unique, or hard to find in alternative forms - eg, W & N make a fabulous Cadmium Lemon (mind you, I'm still using their Finity range, which has been superseded by new developments which I hope have retained Cad Lemon). But there are times when you want to paint with a knife, rather than a brush; times when you want a thick, heavy paint; times when you really need a very fluid, even flat, paint. How on earth can you grade these things in some sort of beauty contest, unless there are obvious advantages in terms of, eg, colour brilliance, workability in all applications? For instance - if I favoured a very flat, smooth, even technique, I wouldn't use Cryla: I might well use Chromacolour in pots, because it's versatile, or perhaps the Ara brand. That doesn't mean that those brands are better than Cryla - the term "horses for courses" springs to mind. I'm sure, of course, that the article which peeved me was really just familiarizing people new to acrylic with some of the ranges available, but I wish writers would resist the temptation to list brands as though you could choose the best this way: you can't. As it happens, there are one or two brands of acrylic, none that I've mentioned, which I think rather less of than others - and price is often the give-away: very cheap paint is rarely likely to be a lot of good (sad, but true). And student paint is just what it says it is, although the distinction between grades in acrylic paint is of little significance - it's of great significance in oil and watercolour, as anyone will know who has tried coaxing any colour out of a rock-hard pan of cheap watercolour from those tins you used to be able to get in gift-shops, aimed, poor little devils, at children and usually containing a pony-hair brush which was less useful as a means of applying paint than a matchstick - which might even have held more water. But acrylic paint is a different kettle of fish - if there are cheap and tacky acrylics (as opposed to PVA colours, which also have their uses, "fine art" not, perhaps, being one of them) then a league table might serve a purpose. Otherwise, surely not. Here endeth the Rant of the Day.

It was, Rob, partly a bit of a nudge to the Forum to get talking again, as it's gone rather quiet. But I have never been known to use a sentence when a paragraph would do.