...or how I made my first oil painting.
I've been working with watercolor all my life but for the longest time, I've felt that I am restricting my movement with these small paintings and have been wanting to make large gestures. My larger watercolor paintings take as long as a week (sometimes a month!) with varying degrees of satisfaction. It's been inevitable that I venture into oil and thought the best product would be a water soluble brand. After some research, I decided to go with the Lukas Berlin.
If you follow my sketches at all, you may remember that I made a
drawing after Degas Landscape in the Orne a while back. The original is pastel 27 x 41 cm (about 10 1/2 x 16"), dated 1885 and is in a private collection.
I temporarily suspended posting at my studies and sketches blog because I started using the sketches in such a way that made me want to wait until the paintings caught up with them. I did say in that particular drawing post that I liked the Orme form so much that I was going to make a big deal out of it. Well, here's the big deal.
I bought a 30 x 40" canvas and, with a sort of general idea of what I was doing, set to work. I've always known the sort of effect that I'd be after when I went to oil — more transparent than impasto, with canvas and layers of underpainting showing through. I love using charcoal but am not crazy about the dust or having to fix it with some ghastly spray so I don't use it much. Still, it was great fun to make the drawing on the canvas.
I think it's hysterical that I didn't even have a proper palette when I started this - just some ceramic bowls and a small plexiglass piece that was thrown in as a bonus once with some supply order. Nor did I have any sense of what brushes would work well although I'd been hanging on to a variety of synthetics for this very day.
Not planning too carefully, I didn't realize I'd mush up all the charcoal with the paint and that the paint would pick it up but I decided that it didn't matter much and somehow worked the charcoal into the underpainting.
Those of you reading this who are experienced oil painters may be grimacing and shaking your heads but I consciously made the decision to find my own way in this process rather than taking a course or following some how-to rule book on oil painting.
For a number of reasons, I mostly worked on this painting at night. I really prefer to only work by daylight. I also must work on strengthening my photographic skills to include better images of large paintings.
My use of this Degas pastel that he made from a drawing on location was completely impulsive but I find it very interesting that Degas educated himself by making copies of paintings in the Louvre and was "an enthusiastic copyist well into middle age."*
I'll be posting on this painting through the remainder of this week. More tomorrow!
*Baumann, Felix; Karabelnik, Marianne, et al. (1994). Degas Portraits. London: Merrell Holberton. ISBN 1-85894-014-1
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