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P1080764

Carol .

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Robert I can't find your post reply about the oil treated canvases. I had read your reply, but didn't have enough time to reply at that moment, and as always found it full of good info. I agree, I did find the paint brought the brush to a grinding halt, and usually at a place within the painting that I could have done without. As a lowly novice, I'll learn to load my brush properly for the area I want to cover, in time. I'll be back with more question as I progress.  

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by Carol Jones

With Sarah, Phil, Ellen, Rose the dentist, and the granddaughter whose name I forget.

Robert Jones, Napa

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There are some oil primed canvases/boards available from Jacksons, but I find their website very hard to follow at times so will leave you to explore it!   The only sizes I could find were too small to bother with - and they will measure things in centimetres, which I can't envisage - give me inches, feet, rods, poles, perches.... not your fancy foreign muck... Sorry: one of those days...
P1080764

Carol .

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That's great, Robert, I'll go explore. I'm inclined to agree, can't beat the good old fashioned imperial weights and measures. I have a question, but I'll keep it in my pocket for another time. A good stiff whiskey or two usually puts me back in tune.
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Lewis Cooper

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As I started this thread, and it's still live, I thought I should add something.   I need to accept that I struggle with using brushes.  This is frustrating, but it's a small thing.  I can still draw.  Others will have problems, you just have to keep on keeping on.  Our Sylvia, for instance, has far worse problems than me.  She's still going strong.  An inspiration. The 'oils' thing came up because I was impressed with many of the oil paintings at my new art club's annual exhibition.  In recent months I've been on trips with my son to London galleries, renewing my acquaintance with many famous oils that are pretty much old friends.  A few weeks ago we went to Cambridge, a city I've always wanted to visit.  We had a great 2 days.  We visited the Fitzwilliam Museum, a splendid place...how I wish it was just up the road.  (It is, in a way, but 145 miles doesn't really qualify as 'just' up the road.) They had a Botticelli on loan from London.... Not really my thing as far as subject matter goes, but I do admire several of his paintings.  I'd imagined he painted in tempera.  This one was tempera AND oils.  Oils on TOP of tempera I assume.  I think oils were becoming more used around this time.  As ever, it was a delight to see the real thing.  My photo doesn't do it justice. A painting by the Pre-Raphaelite  John Everett Millais caught my eye...the Bridesmaid... ...it was much smaller than I'd expected, not much bigger than A4.  It glowed. Another artist I've always admired is Stanley Spencer.  He paints in two styles.  Traditional and also in an offbeat, almost cartoonish style.  I'd already seen his murals in a church at Cookham.  I knew of this painting, of himself and his mistress, but had never seen the real thing.  Bright and fresh as though he'd painted it yesterday... Another bonus of this trip was seeing a work by Diego Rivera, the renowned Mexican Muralist.  I love his work, most of which is in South American.  This was a study for a mural.  It was huge... So it was all this exposure to great work that prompted my trying oils again.  I also get inspiration from many of the oil painters on POL.  I'm not going to list them, I'd miss some out.  If you use oils I mean you! I have to please me first...my attempts at oils aren't good, but they're not dire either.  So I must try again, at least now I've learned that with the way I need to work it'll take a while. I'd like to get a couple of decent oil paintings done before my number is called.  Not being morbid, I may have years ahead of me.  I'm 84, rushing headlong towards 85.  In fact for this old boy, the only thing that CAN rush is time.  In my personal art mantra oils are the Lord of mediums, so a couple of oils that I'd consider hanging on my walls would be just dandy. Thanks again to everybody for all the help and advice.

Edited
by Lewis Cooper

With Sarah, Phil, Ellen, Rose the dentist, and the granddaughter whose name I forget.

Robert Jones, Napa

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Well done, Lew - one way to keep going is to keep learning and trying things we've not tried before (within reason: white-water surfing is perhaps beyond both of us).  It wasn't unusual to paint in oils over tempera - there's a video about it by the man who was banged up for forgery... Keating?  He had to know what he was doing in order to fool the experts, and he demonstrated an oil over tempera, as I recall.   One thing to bear in mind about Botticelli et al is that their paintings were very different in technique from the Impressionists (who deliberately CHOSE to break from them) - they used many layers, lead featuring in all of them, they made their own paint, developed their own oils and mediums, taught more in their studios to apprentices than most art schools could teach today (not because the schools are poor, though they may be, but because the scope of things they have to cover is so much greater: the Old Masters taught their pupils to paint their way; that gave rise to much of the preoccupation with a given studio's "secrets", which obsessed people like Maroger, and before him, Reynolds - snag is, they guessed at those secrets, got the recipes wrong, and some of their paintings just fell off the canvas).
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Lewis Cooper

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The egg tempera intrigues me, Robert.  Water based and quick drying I know.  It sounds like it ought to be fragile and certainly not long lasting, yet I also know it was used by the Egyptians in the Pyramids.  I read an article about it that said it was dry as soon as it left the brush.  I agree about learning and trying new things, but I'll give tempera a miss, along with bungee-jumping and corn on the cob. You have to admire those old-time painters, perhaps you needed a bit of the chemist in you.  Even Leonardo, he of the supposed scientific bent, messed things up...his 'Last Supper' seems to have needed conserving almost as soon as he finished it.  I wonder if what we see now is anything of his. A risky business old time painting.  The lead was, and is, dangerous.  I remember later doctors saying Michelangelo had 'painter's colic'...where lead is absorbed into the system.  Goya painted with his fingers and went blind and deaf.  Yet it was known that lead was dangerous since Roman times.

Alan Bickley

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Just to clarify a point regarding the infamous art forger Tom Keating. He was prosecuted but the case was dropped due to a variety of factors - he never went to prison! He went on to paint and sell his own paintings and signed in his own name. I did buy one of his, a Norfolk scene with windmill etc, that was a a decade ago, but have since sold it on… He was a very ill man with respiratory issues, due to the toxic chemicals and lead based paints used in his restoration work and forgery years! A dangerous game indeed, as Lew has pointed out! Robert of course, is all too aware because he has an in depth knowledge of such hazardous materials!

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by Alan Bickley

P1080764

Carol .

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I read you post, and the paintings earlier in the day, Lewis. This has been on my mind, especially the Botticelli painting, and maybe other classical paintings you view, do you ever imaging such art portrayed with the characteristics of the way you paint? I've tried to imagine how it would look. Have you ever done this?  
With Sarah, Phil, Ellen, Rose the dentist, and the granddaughter whose name I forget.

Robert Jones, Napa

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I suspect that it was more likely to be the solvents in Tom Keating's case than any lead he used - his respiratory problems were very obvious in his videos; lead doesn't normally lead to respiratory failure, though.  It certainly can lead to other problems, if ingested - usually through clumsy practices in studios, like eating while you paint and not being too particular about washing your hands; it CAN also seep into the bloodstream through fissures and cuts; otherwise, its real danger comes from making it in the first place, and carelessness about allowing it to leach into the environment during manufacture - in which case it can cause horrible problems, especially for children in the area of its manufacture: as they grow, they're very vulnerable to toxins.   All of this can be prevented: the trouble was that it wasn't, in the past. I think Keating also used - again, to fool the experts - all kinds of other hazardous materials: resins, mercury, petroleum distillates of several kinds, varnishes laced with Turpentine: and he smoked - amazing really that he didn't go off with a bang...  He said he took to forgery, as I remember (and I might mis-remember: I'd forgotten he didn't go to prison) because he didn't succeed as an artist in his own right; well - there are many who could say that, but there we are.  He got bitter, annoyed with the "experts", wanted to show them up, and succeeded in that, at least.  I don't think I've ever seen one of his own, truly original paintings. 

Alan Bickley

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Yes, it was decades of breathing in the toxic fumes from all the many different chemicals he was using, I mentioned the lead paint but I agree, it wouldn’t be from that! I have his book in my art library, The Fakes Progress… worth reading but second hand copies don’t come cheap!

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by Alan Bickley

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Lewis Cooper

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Carol...I'm not fond of much of the subject matter of the old masters.  Religion, myths, and vast battle scenes mostly painted by people who've never seen a battle.  When I looked at the Botticelli, I tended to study bits of it...how did he paint the face, the hands, the eyes, etc.  So these aren't subject matters I see myself wanting to paint.   That said I have  painted a few as parodies, jokes, in my simpler cartoon style. I do like to paint characters in a more detailed way, usually caricature style, simply because I like to.  It's more playful than painting realistically, and that appeals to me.  I quite like the idea of doing something like that in oils.  There are a number of artists who paint canvasses in a cartoonish/caricature/satirical way.  Here's a painting by Thierry Bruet, a French artist, who studied fine art and paints satirical/caricature paintings in oils on canvas.  This is Coco Channel... ...I'll be doing a piece on him in Dixie's art thread later.

Martin Shaw

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That is a great picture
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