Oil Painting

This week I was planning on refreshing my oil painting supplies and consequently, I've been really delving deep into oil paint research. Last autumn I attended a portrait painting class which made me realize just how little I knew about oil paints themselves.

I was first introduced to oil painting when I was around 8 years old, which was in the late 90’s. My dad used to paint and had a collection of oil paints that, at the time, were available only at hardware stores – I was told there weren’t any professional art stores in the country so many painters made due with what was easier to come by.* I think the closest art store was in Graz, Austria, but back then paints were more expensive than they are today and not many artists were able to afford professional supplies. That’s why a lot of paints came from hardware stores. I’ve kept some of those tubes for memory’s sake and they’re made by Rubens, Winsor & Newton, Aero* (a little more about it in the footnote) and by a company I wasn’t even able to identify.

As I child, I really didn’t care where the paints were from or who made them – what was most important to my younger self was how much joy they gave my dad. Which brings me to the second point – now, as an adult, I still associate the smell of oil paints with him being happy and excited while explaining a bunch of painting related stuff that I didn’t understand whatsoever back then but I still kept close attention to. In my mind, oil painting became this almost magical thing that great artists did. I read once how smell is associated with memory and that’s definitely the case for me. The scent of oil paint is the scent of happiness, focus, art, patience and almost meditative stillness. These days when I paint with my painting group, whenever someone decides to do oil, I relax and can focus much better on my own work. That’s in part why I think oil is perhaps the greatest art medium out there. Because I associate it with certain positive emotions and events that as a child, I found wonderous.

My first ever oil painting was of a cabin in the woods (I have no idea where it's stored). I think I might have been 10 years old. After that, because oil paints became a medium which, in my mind, was reserved only for the best artwork, I preferred pencils and tempera paints that were cheaper and easier to get a hold of. In high school I upgraded to watercolors and fancier color pencils, but still didn’t want to touch oil. Once I started university, I produced the second oil painting for class (after 8 years!). Now that I think about it, despite my general dislike for acrylics, I have always used them more often than oils. I think it’s high time to challenge that and to really embrace oil paints for what they are – an art medium. Meant to be used and appreciated, but they don’t make the artist. It’s the other way around.   

One of these days I’m probably going to write about how the environment shapes you as an artist, about how certain words get imprinted into your mind and stay there until you start purposefully changing your mindset. For example, I’ve heard from many artists how they find watercolors difficult to use and don’t want to even start out of fear of such a difficult medium – and to be honest, yes, watercolors are difficult to learn, especially when it comes to control. But it all comes down to expectation (I’m definitely not excluded in this way of thinking). If you have a certain image in your head on how your artwork should look like, you have already set a high bar of expectation. Watercolors, notorious for being unpredictable, especially for beginners, will do the complete opposite of what you expect. And if your expectations are too high, if you want to achieve a certain standard, it’s highly likely you’ll fail – in your estimation at least. Which is going to cause you to put a certain art medium away. As I did with oil colors. It was all due to expectation of greatness. Out of fear of “failure”, despite there only being happy accidents as Bob Ross would put it. And I wholeheartedly agree with him. Yes, it is hard sometimes to think that way, but it’s really important that in that moment, you treat yourself with love and kindness. Remind yourself of those happy accidents instead of great, exaggerated failures.

Continuing on the topic of oil painting – my most recent discovery was that I have an eclectic collection of various colors with very different opaqueness/transparency. Once I really started looking into it and researching different brands and mediums, it became clear to me that I wasn’t paying attention to the consistency of paint or why it’s too liquidy or too thick. I simply compensated with adding/not adding oil and never thought about it twice. I guess what I’m trying to say is to pay attention to that when buying paints – I know it’s obvious, but to me it wasn’t, apparently. The formulas can vary a lot from brand to brand. What this means in practice is that the paints are not behaving as you’re expecting them too and you’re left wondering why that orange isn’t as orange as you wanted or why that brown is leaving everything flat. Of course, it has to do a lot with how you mix the colors, but you’ll know the difference whether you’re having issues with your paints or if you struggle with color theory.

All of this was a small, personal revelation which might sound funny, but it blew my mind. So now, my small collection of Schminke Akademie oils is going to need a decent upgrade.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this read; I’ve a bunch of art supply rambles brewing in my brain so there will probably be more!

I’ll see you next week, have fun and draw on!

Vanteri, 31. 1. 2025

---

*I live in Slovenia so there were some Slovene made oil paints available. The company that produced them was Aero, which later on focused more on providing school supplies (I’ve read they’re currently bankrupt).