Painting is one of the earliest, most natural and exalted forms of art. It doesn’t require electricity to make or enjoy, it stops time and brings us closest to our most creative selves. Yet despite how many people long to try it, let alone master it, too many get daunted by the overwhelming variety of materials or the thought of needing to use harmful solvents if using oil.
In a field dominated by texts written mostly last century or centuries earlier, it is refreshing, if not unusual, to find a comprehensive book by a contemporary artist known for the medium. With humor, clarity, and illustrations and color images, Kimberly Brooks’ The New Oil Painting exposes the mediums’ long hidden secrets lto the sunlight of modern science and walks readers step-by-step through oil painting fundamentals—the nature and history of pigments, which materials you actually need and why.
Drawing equally from ancient manuscripts and modern chemistry, Kimberly Brooks’ The New Oil Painting serves as an ideal reference manual and a survival guide, intended both for experienced oil painters who want to paint without solvents and for new painters who are approaching oil painting for the first time.
Excerpt
Part I. Materials
Paint > Pigments > Black (Introduction)
If you ever want to make a majority of painters look guilty, ask them what they use for black. A few will announce a tried-and-true recipe. Many others will make sure no one is listening and then lean forward and say, “I use mine out of the tube.” Black paint was once an integral part of a classical painter’s palette, but the nineteenth-century impressionists all but banned it from their palettes in favor of capturing shadows and light as they are actually created—as variations on the natural refractions and combinations of the visible color spectrum. Ever since, artists have felt pressure to create blacks on the spot. The reasoning holds even more true today: The array of colors we have is head-spinning, and if you can create a color, especially a dark, out of two or three others, you will get an astonishing depth—almost a shimmering as the concentration of each color wavers in and out of focus. A common recipe for black is Burnt Sienna or Burnt Umber and Ultramarine Blue. I once created a painting that employed every type of black I had in a tube; some receded into the shadows, and others pushed forward. Here are the common black pigments out of the tube, should you choose to use them.
EXCERPT
Part II. Best Practices
Tone Your Surface First (Introduction)
Artists most often need an imprimatura to begin. Traditionally artists start with an earthy, atmospheric mass. Contemporary artists add their own twist, like Helen Frankenthaler, who poured paint on the backs of the canvases in order to react to the shapes created on the other side. Best to leave the blank page to our artistic cousins, the writer. Unlike the medium of watercolor, where the white of the substrate provides the light and darks are added, painting with oil involves adding light, and starting with a percolating rumble of colors only makes any added layers richer. Traditional Renaissance painters carefully mapped or transferred a drawing onto a surface and then applied a toning layer that served as a fixative for the drawing but also created colors other than white on which to apply paint. Colors shift in appearance depending on the colors and values that surround it. This first layer does not have to be perfect by any means—in fact, the lightest atmospheric layer of color will do. It is simply a way to start the process. Common toning colors involve earth tones such as Raw Umber or Sienna. Many contemporary artists use hot pinks and then paint more subtle hues over them. Whether or not toning colors are visible in the resulting painting, they make the colors above jump and sparkle nonetheless.
Toning a canvas has many other advantages. It unites color values and invigorates areas of the painting that are uniform. Toning can also act as an outline for the central picture. There are many different approaches to starting a painting by toning a canvas. Some artists use one or two colors to create shadows and provide contrast for the complementary colors to come. Others create a sketch by laying down an atmospheric tonal layer then using a rag to wipe away areas of it to expose the lighter ground underneath, thus loosely mapping and blocking out a composition with paint. Another excellent method is to recycle an old painting by toning it with a thin glaze before beginning a new composition on top. The partially obscured painting underneath will offer unexpected areas of excitement and the painter a chance to rejoice in discovering where it might lead.
…Regardless of your method, the atmosphere created by toning does more than merely spring applied colors to life; it turns the canvas into a window revealing the endless possibilities of what the painting can be. Start- ing a painting on white is akin to listening to music in mono, or to landing at Charles de Gaulle Airport to visit Paris but never leaving the tarmac. Starting with color opens the doors to richness. The image on the painting should be conjured as much as rendered. Give yourself that chance by toning the canvas first.
Above Image: Abstract Climates, Oil on Linen. Helen Frankenthaler