Painters often have to figure out how to deal with the screw-on
tops of tubes of paint and bottles of linseed oil, turpentine and other mediums
that won’t come off by hand. Here’s how I was able this morning to open an
old jar of Grumbacher cobalt drier that hadn’t been opened in years. The cap
seemed to be cemented on. First I tried
the usual approach. I grabbed a pair of
pliers and tried to twist the cap off.
No luck. So I picked up my
heavier duty pump pliers, which provided a little more pressure to the twist,
and voila! Success! I heard the crack of the bottle neck and soon
had cobalt drier squirting all over my left hand and forearm and splattering on
my t-shirt, as well as on the table surface.
That’s the way to open any old jar of medium when you can’t screw the lid
off by hand. Try it sometime. I know I will. Quite a bit of the cobalt drier was still in the lower
three-quarters of the little jar, so I poured it into a mostly empty glass
bottle I had in the studio containing some drier, some stand oil and some
dammar varnish. Years later, the Good
Lord willing, when I have long forgotten how I opened the jar this morning, I
will be able to apply this time-honored technique when I have the urge to experiment
with cobalt drier once more and the cap will again be cemented to the bottle.
Fans are still blowing in the studio room to air out the
place. I threw away the t-shirt, a new
one, of course, and the pants I was wearing.
I think I was able to wash off all the cobalt drier before it was sucked
into my skin, which would eventually lead to a fatal case of cobalt poisoning. But how can I be sure?
In the old days, when movies had selected short subjects,
there was a popular series in the 1940s and 50s called “Behind the Eight Ball
with Joe McDoakes.” I remember it as Joe
Doakes, which I like better, but I can live with the truth, once in awhile. All my life I have been that Joe
McDoakes. Joe would do stupid things
like climb a tree and sit on the wrong side of the limb he was sawing off and
suffer the obvious consequences of his impractical stupidity.
When things like this happen to me, as they often do, I am
convinced anew that if you are as lacking in common sense as I am, if you can’t
make things and fix things yourself, or don’t live with someone who can, you
might as well forget about a painting career.
It just isn’t worth all the aggravation.
I remember the old aphorism that “an artist makes his own.” That is, you can’t go to an art store and buy
all the things you need, you have to come up with practical solutions for your
own painting setup. Many painters I’ve
met have been able to fashion ingenious devices to simplify their work,
including basic things like carriers for brushes, canvases and colors, and
attachments for the palette and easel to hold all the supplies needed for a
painting session. I’m not able to do
such things. Then there are all the
hours of work involved in preparing canvas and panels to get them ready for
painting, work that is made more tedious for impractical souls like me. If you are a purist for traditional painting
methods and fancy the original gesso priming with chalk or marble dust and rabbit
skin glue, you will be spending far more time preparing your materials than painting,
or so it seems. I tried that early in my
career and made a royal sticky mess of the work. Stretching canvas and priming can take
enormous amounts of time. You can buy
surfaces ready-made to paint on, but the best of them are extremely expensive
and the cheap materials need to be given additional coats of primer to make
them suitable for use. And even the best
of linens can have a defect in the weave that always ends up in an obvious place,
for example on the subject’s face if you are painting a portrait. Painting the picture can be the least of your
problems. There is only one solution –
studio assistants to do all the dirty work.
When my ship comes in I’m going to hire one or two.
I blame Grumbacher for this current disruption of my
normally serene painter’s life for another reason. Although I willingly joined the blogosphere
ostensibly to write about art matters, I realized a couple of days ago that I
have offered absolutely no useful advice about the practice of oil painting on
canvas, which is what I do. One of the
major reasons for this apparent abdication of my professional responsibility is
that after 30 years of devotion to duty, I still don’t know what I’m
doing. I know you use brushes and oil
colors and mediums to make marks on stretched canvas that hopefully will result
in the peach you are staring at on the table look like the peach you are staring
at. This goal has been denigrated since
Plato’s time and is especially subject to attack today with the advent of
high-definition photography, which makes objects seem more real than reality
itself to the uninitiated, who are in the vast majority. As I’ve written before, we now want our
realist paintings to look like our photographs.
Nevertheless, it’s what I like doing and will continue to do
as long as possible. So to make amends
for my previous lack of tutorial advice, I was going to offer some practical information
on a matter that was once of greater concern to representational painters than
it is today. I was going to reveal to
you the secret of painting a dew drop.
What? You already know how to
paint a dew drop? Well, hush my
mouth! I myself was bowled over when I learned
about it. This dew drop technique is so
simple that even painters who attended art school should, after a day or two of
concentrated effort and some aerobic exercise, be able to paint a dew drop,
which was once part of a still life painter’s standard bag of tricks. Proudly
self-proclaimed self-taught artists immediately grasp the underlying principles
of such useful gimmicks, which they eagerly and liberally apply to their
creations.
I was fascinated for awhile by the depiction of the dew drop
in oil paintings after a friend and I went a couple of times to the Greenwich
Village outdoor art show in the early 1980s and passed by the booth of a
painter who specialized in painting Red Delicious apples with dew drops on
them. The dew drops were such a
prominent element of the paintings that we both thought the painter should
eliminate the apples and just paint the dew drops.
As you may already have surmised, I can take absolutely no
credit whatsoever in developing this dew drop technical analysis. It is the handiwork of some uncredited artist
writing in an advice column in Issue No. 24 of Grumbacher’s quarterly magazine
called “Palette Talk,” a 15-page publication that was handed out free at the
art stores in the 1970s and 80s. It
contained articles on artists and Grumbacher art supplies and offered lots of
useful tips for painters. Most painters
have come across an issue or two of this publication. I suspect the author of the dew-drop theory
was the redoubtable Helen van Wyck (1930-1994), who often contributed to the quarterly’s
advice column, “Palette Scrapings.” Van
Wyck was a pioneer “how-to” artist on television, wrote a couple of books on
painting and had a nice career as an artist and teacher alongside all the great
Rockport and Gloucester painters of
the mid-20th Century.
My ignorant pride prevented me from ever watching the TV
painters, but I was not unaware of some of their useful pronouncements. And I understood that the kitschy wet-on-on
wet technique of Bob Ross and his mentor, William “Bill” Alexander, got closer
to the actual paint handling technique of many of the old masters than the work
of the “academics,” who were wasting their time trying to figure out what
mediums Titian and Rembrandt might have used.
A Chicago artist named D.M. Campana, who wrote a series of little
paperback books called “The Teacher of Oil Painting” in the 1920s and 30s, and who
had sure-fire recipes for everything you ever wanted to know about painting,
was himself leery of painters like Ross and Alexander, whose predecessors apparently
were called “lightning artists.” Campana
gave a good written description of their technique and counseled young artists
to avoid the magician’s tricks of these commercial artists who make so many
pictures of the same subject that they can paint them from memory. He considered their paintings to be artistically
worth the very little paid for them, or less.
At any rate, I was going to provide my own dew drop
demonstration for my phantom readers, but the Red Delicious apple I painted the
day before was still wet, and painting the dew drop wet-in-wet would have
defeated the purpose of this Grumbacher-approved guaranteed method to paint a
dew drop. Since I have never officially
painted a dew drop, I wanted to do it “by the book.” This led to my unhappy encounter with Grumbacher’s
cobalt drier this morning. I was hoping
I could somehow speed up the drying and take another shot at the apple. Here is Grumbacher’s editor’s note about
this important subject: “This department
constantly gets letters about painting dew drops. We hope to answer satisfactorily all the
letters with this step-by-step demonstration of dew drops.”
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| Grumbacher's Dew Drop Demo |
Not surprisingly, I have lost interest in this project. So you go ahead, and when the painting of the
apple or tomato, which Grumbacher used, is dry, just put a tiny white highlight dot where
you want the dew drop to appear. Then
smudge the highlight on the side opposite the direction of the light. Then paint a half moon with white, black and
a little local color to indicate the shape of the dew drop. Then darken the local color and paint a
shadow on the underside of the dew drop and you are done! See, you don’t need me to grumpily hassle
with my digital camera to record my own awkward demonstration. I’m sure you can do it better yourself. Happy painting!
