Turpentine diaries 8/18/18
I am keeping everything simple and direct with The Woman in the Red Pants. Overworking can be death to a painting. On the other hand, I have a horror of…
Turpentine diaries 5/12/19
As much as I whine and moan about this or that, I’m not the hot-house plant that I may appear. And sometimes my paintings go well! (Although, I won’t say…
Retouch varnish
When you work on an oil painting over an extended period, colors sometimes become dull. The upper paint layers merge with an earlier layers. This process is called sinking in.…
Turpentine diaries 1/28/18
I’ve written several times about the oil paint manufacturer RGH. No, I don’t have a relationship with them, it’s just that I use their product a lot. Their flake white…
Turpentine diaries 12/31/2018
Art is filled with aphorisms. Fat over lean, for instance, is a famous adage. The meaning for this old saw that is the most straightforward is to paint thickly-applied paint…
Artists with small brushes
Most of the tropes we learn about art and art-making are rubbish. One meaningless trope is, “Real artistes only use large brushes.” Alright, then. “A six-inch brush for this five-inch…
Turpentine diaries 7/16/17
I decided to work on my backlog of unfinished studies and small paintings. I worked on all of the paintings in the photo today, the bottom-left one last. Read moreCleveland Museum…
Turpentine diaries 4/28/18
This photo shows my first painting session with Agamemnon and Orestes. I know, I know, a bit high falutin but I am reading Aeschylus’s Eumenides. Agamemnon and Orestes is 44″…