Oil paint - "smelly and messy"?

One of our number, whose painting I was looking at just now, remarks in his intro that he's a member of an art group, but oils are verboten!  Because they're messy, and they smell. I think I might have to concede the "messy" bit; if you're working in a village hall, for instance, yes, I can see there could be problems if everyone were painting in oil - they'd have to take their painty rags and kitchen roll away with them, with their brushes....it COULD be done; some groups manage it.  But acrylics and watercolour would be a lot easier. But the smell ...?  Oil paint doesn't particularly smell, or it doesn't smell bad; Linseed oil has an odour, but not an unpleasant one.  Turps, on the other hand, is odoriferous - and incidentally, not good for one's lungs.  Low odour thinners are still bad for us even if we can't smell them.   But - you don't have to use thinners.  As it happens, I've taken to them again; and have hit a snag; my underpainting using Turps looks good enough to stand on its own, almost - I must photograph it tomorrow and show it as a WIP.  It looks so good that I'm nervous about adding more paint (by "good" I speak in relative terms: I like it because I wasn't expecting it to look any good at all at this stage. Anyway - if you don't like the smell of oil painting, use the water miscible ones, or - just don't use solvents/thinners.  I don't say it's easy, but it's certainly possible.  And that is my message of the day!

You can use washing up liquid on regular oil paint too - provided you blot off, squeeze out the excess paint into a kitchen towel; I never clean brushes in solvent - it's not good for them, natural hog or synthetic. As for painting with solvents - it is a bit more difficult, or you have to learn slightly different techniques.  How to thin your paint to a workable consistency if you don't, is the usual question.  Use a little Linseed oil instead of solvent; mash the paint with a palette knife, and you can reduce it to as fluid a consistency as you like, though it'll never flow like water, because oil doesn't break down the paint as Turps/OMS do.   What about fat over lean?  Well, that doesn't mean you can't use ANY oil in early layers - just that when you add further layers, you either add a little more oil, or a more oil-rich colour - there's rarely any need to add more oil to the cadmiums, or Titanium white, because they're already very heavy in oil and are very slow dryers.  When you really need your fluid paint, it'll tend to be in the upper layers anyway - and in reality, few of us paint in that many layers - some do, and those painters need to be aware of fat over lean, especially on flexible surfaces; but alla prima painters, or those who paint over three or four sessions over so many days, don't need to panic over this.    Being careful about fat over lean was important for the painters of - generally - past generations, who painted in monochrome, then added multiple glazes - too much oil in the base coats, too little in the glazes, and cracking could ensue.  I would guess that almost none of us here normally paint in quite that way now.  I love to glaze, by the way, but a) I wouldn't glaze with Turps (that would be asking for trouble) and b) I don't employ the very high number of glazes said to have been employed by, say, Titian - though it would be fun to try that as an experiment one of these days. In passing - I admire your very practical ways of dealing with oil paint in your art groups: I'm not a bad organizer - that was by way of being my profession - but am pretty hopeless with practical things, like creating boxes with dividers to hold wet paintings.  The pochade box would be ideal for this, though, and no more difficult to manage than painting outdoors.