oil-painting-mezan

Oil Painting

What is Oil Painting?, refer to Duane Preble and friends in Artforms, in the Western world, oil paint has been favorite medium for five centuries. Pigments mixed with various vegetable oils, such as linseed, walnut, and poppy seed, were used in the Middle Ages for decorative purposes, but until the fifteenth century did Flemish painters fully develop the used of paint made with linseed oil pressed from the seeds of the flax plant. In this early period, artist applied oil paint to wood panels covered with smooth layers of gesso, as in the older tradition of tempera painting.

The van Eyck brothers, Hubert and Jan, are credited with developing oil painting techniques and bringing them to the first perfection. They achieved glowing, jewel-like surfaces that remain amazingly fresh to the present day.

Oil has many advantages not found in other traditional media. Compared to tempera, oil paint can provide both increased opacity-which yields better covering power-and, when thinned, greater transparency. Its slow drying time, first considered a drawback, soon proved to be a distinct advantage,permitting strokes of color to be blended and repeated changes to be made during the painting process. Unlike pigment in tempera, gouache, and acrylic, pigment colors in oil change little when drying; however, oil medium (primarily linseed oil) has tendency to darken and yellow slightly with age. Because of the flexibility of dried oil film, sixteenth-century Venetian painter who wished to paint large pictures could replace heavy wood panels with canvas stretched on wood frames. A painted canvas not only is light in weight, but also can be unstretched and rolled (if the paint layer is not too thick) for transporting. Canvas continues to be the preferred support for oil paintings.

Oil can be applied thickly or thinly, wet into wet or wet onto dry. When a work is painted wet into wet and completed at one sitting, the process is called the direct painting method.

Rembrandt used this method in his (self-portrait). The detail here shows how the impasto of light and dark paint both defines a solid-looking head and present the incredible richness of Rembrandt's brushwork.

The wide range of approaches possible with oil paint becomes apparent when we compare van Eyck's subtly glazed colors with the impasto surfaces of Rembrandt.

In one sense, the story of painting is about the visual magic that people around the world have been able to conjure up with various paint media. Within a single painting, a unique world is created; but that world is often influenced by, if not inspired by, the artist's own daily life. Such is the case with Grace Hartigan's (City Life). A street vendor fruit stand is the jumping-off point for an exuberant feast of dancing lines and colorful shapes piled one on top of another. Hartigan's sensitivity to sumptuous color and her skill with bold brush work heightened her expressive response to the lively, moving complexity of her urban environment.

Joan Mitchell used oil paint to spontaneously re-create emotional states in abstract visual form. (Border) is painted very loosely in complex mix of rich, sensuous colors. The composition is subtly symmetrical (note the light vertical green stripe near the top center), and colors are applied with a combination of care and abandon. To arrive at the artist avoided overmixing her colors. She also allowed the texture of the paint to play a major role in the work by varying its thickness over a wide range. she made the yellow strokes with dry brush; she allowed some of the blues to run; reds give accents at carefully selected points. We can actually follow the creation of this work, layer by layer and color, as we look at this embodiment of warm-even exciting-mood (Preble et. el., 2002: 130).

Bibliography
1. PREBLE D., PREBLE S., and FRANK P. Artform. Seven Edition. London: Prentice Hall International (UK) Limited, 2002.