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January 12, 2004
the paint and the brushes
The paint, originally squeezed or dropped in separate dollops, merges across the palette, from light to dark, from right to left*. This doesn’t happen straight away, it happens as the paint is used, as the hues and tints are created.
This palette is created by the brushes. The brushes merge the paint, and the paint builds up on the brushes. When I have been painting for a few hours and the palette is beginning to evolve, creating a wealth of rich skin tones, the brushes are building up a mixture of hues and tints. It is this build up on the brushes that creates a new level to the process of painting. I only vaguely know what tints and what strengths are on each brush, so I can be delighted by the marks the brushes make on the panel. [I can be horrified too – but that is the delight of oil paint: it can be scraped off]
*I lay up my palette with white on the right, dark on the left. In my various studios, the windows have always been on my right, facing North for the matter of that, and therefore the light streams across the model from the right. Maybe that’s why I put the white on the right and the dark on the left. Not to mention rhymes and Latin significance and cranial job allocations.
Posted by john at January 12, 2004 05:08 PM
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