So I've recently been painting in oils.
Water Miscible Oils, to be precise. They're made with
safflower oil that has been
chemically altered at the molecular level to be water-soluble. Paint and chemistry - together at last!
So it was important for me to try and do some research on the subject, since I have no formal art training and I understand that oils are a highly technical medium. I want to do well right away. I read some online tutorials about the subject as preparation, knowing, of course, that they wouldn't be quite enough. But at least I have a theoretical understanding of the very basics. I did some Googling around for these tutorials, scanned a few and discarded them, but there were two that stood out as being sufficiently nuts-and-bolts to help me -
Jess Bates's website and
Bill Martin's. There are, presumably, others that are technical in intention, but I'll have to get arounfdto them later.
It's also not enough to simply know how to do a thing - one also must know what to do with it. Sure I could be trying to do dry tonal exercises on spheres and cones, but to be honest that sucks boaby. I don't have the time or the canvases to spare on that, and little interest. I am aware that I'll probably have to do it to progress in the future, but right now I am focusing on having fun with the medium, mostly just figuring out for myself how the paint feels and works. The only problem is that to do anything other than dry technical exercises, it seems that one needs inspiration. And many days, I find that lacking.
Everyone has their own method of getting some inspiration together. When I feel like I need to do something, but don't have a clear idea of what I need to do, I generally round up my artbooks and leaf through them. I also do this with websites of artists whose books I don't own. So to present a very few of the colossal number artists whose work gives me ideas: dark-themed hyper-realist
Michael Hussar, providing, if anything, a gruesome and insightful commentary through his symbolism (check out the piece entitles Vasoline), Scottish Colourist
J D Fergusson who evidently delighted in the 'voluptuous delights of life', the expressive work of
Chris Dingwell and the fantasy hyper-realism of
Christophe Vacher,
Paul Bonner and
John Howe (I know, there's clearly something about me that loves highly detailed fantasy art). I might also suggest that one checks out the sculptorial/assemblage work of
Christopher Conte, which I discovered through the tattoo blog
Needles and Sins. I love me some mechanisms and biomechanical stuff. Oddly not so much in tattoos, though.
Anyway, these are a few of the things that I am drawn to when languishing in the doldrums, or lost in need of direction. Like a dog that instinctively grubs for the roots and herbs that it somehow knows will cure it of its maladies, I return again and again to these people's work, most of all the sketches and preliminaries. There's more, of course, but that'll have to wait for another day.
So there you have it - a little technique, a little inspiration and a buttload of determination, and I'll go from here.
This is a bit of a beach at sunset, at a village called Collieston, which is near to the city in which I now live, Aberdeen. It's a rocky motherlover (geogeeks, UNITE!) and all the rocks are slanted at the familiar angle. I'm not sure what rock the beach is based on - given it's location in Scotland it's a fair bet to say either granite or gneiss. Next time I'm there, I'll take way better pictures of the rocks so I can furnish you, dear readers, with my best guess. More discussion after the jump
