Mediums

The best medium is no medium. If you are happy making your paintings from paint directly out of the tube or having just a thimbleful of stand oil on your palette that is ideal. However if you are using lots of turpentine to thin your paint, that's not good at all. You need to use a medium.
Mediums are used to make the paint flow, control drying and surface gloss and sometimes to level brushstrokes. Here are the three mediums I commonly use.
The first two are alkyd mediums. Alkyd is a paint additive that promotes quick drying and makes for a tough paint film. I use Galkyd most of the time, I thin it by 1/3 with mineral spirits. It seems too thick and dries too fast as it comes out of the bottle. Galkyd is a Gamblin product and I order it from Jerrys' Artarama or ASW. The good thing about Galkyd is that it has a shine, like a varnish medium. The bad thing about Galkyd is that it will dry up in the bottle, so buy a big bottle and decant it into two smaller bottles and fill the one you are storing all the way to the top of the neck including as little air as you can.
Liquin made by Winsor & Newton is the other well known Alkyd medium. It handles well right out of the bottle but you can thin it to make it last longer. It is a thixotropic gel, that is, it is a gel till you push it with your brush, then it liquefies, when you take your brush away it gels again. Liquin has a somewhat matt finish, so it needs to be varnished to look as good later as when you painted it, and some people find it irritates their nasal membranes.
One thixotropic gel is Marogers medium. I do not recommend you use Marogers, there is a group of artists from New York that use the stuff. Jaques Maroger was a curator of painting at the Louvre in about 1900 who believed he had found the secret of the old masters , He cooked what is called litharge and black oil. It involoves heating lead, and is extremely poisonous, I have no problem painting with lead. I do have a problem with cooking it. Marogers is by most accounts impermanent, although it does impart a beautiful transparent body to the paint, and gives a silky sort of handling. Gamblin makes a substitute. I believe they call it neo-meglip. Meglip is another name for the sort of gel that Maroger popularized. Marogers users have a cult like devotion to the stuff and should never be confronted about its use. There are some painters out there doing great work with the stuff though. If you are already using Marogers and wish to continue, hey, I warned you.
While I think alkyd is great medium and use it most of the time it is the product of modern chemistry and is not a traditional medium.
The most common traditional medium is usually referred to as VTO. It is a mixture of equal parts damar varnish and stand oil (sometimes linseed oil) and 3 to 7 parts TURPENTINE. I stress turpentine because mineral spirits is not a good thinner for damar varnish, I f you use damar in your process, your thinner must be turpentine. Every artist who uses this medium seems to tweak it to their own liking. If you use too much oil it can give you a surface that is sticky like flypaper.
I have used turpentine from the hardware store for years, however finding quality turpentine has become difficult. Much of it no longer smells sweetly of pine, but has a dreadful odor. It still says gum turpentine on the outside but I don't know if it really is. There are still some brands that are right. I take it to the counter and say something like "does this turpentine smell like death?" They will usually let me open the can, (including its little inner metal hymen) and smell it, if it doesn't smell like pine I let them smell it and refuse to buy it. If the clerk is a totally uninformed and unconcerned high school kid I can't pull this, so I try to deal with the manager or the old guy who runs the paint department.
There are times when you want your paint to stay open for a long time (dry slowly) poppy oil works nicely for that.
Years ago I used Taubes copal medium. Then one day I went to the art store and bought some that was totally different I quit buying it. The quality of most of these materials is constantly changing and you have to watch out for that. If you want that enamel like copal finish you can still get copal tears from Pearl paint, along with most other exotic vanishes like mastic etc. that I really don't have a use for, but you may.
Most of the time I use deodorized mineral spirits from the hardware store. Gamblin makes a nice one called Gamsol. Double rectified, English or artists grade turps can be had from online suppliers and is a really fine product. As oil paint is phased out in house painting we may have to buy this when we use turpentine. It is of course much more expensive.
I guess a word on permanence is required here. I have known plenty of artists, who grind their own paint and use only copal tears cut with turpentine made by Benedictine monks in their underwear. These artists make paintings which will last forever but should never been made in the first place. Its like some guys I knew in the 70s who had these incredibly expensive stereos , but only had six albums, two of which were by Kansas. They were so hung up on the technology that they forgot it was about the music. I had a very ordinary stereo but I had a LOT of music. The point I am making here is that, it is about the pictures more than the process. You can make yourself really crazy over materials, and plenty of folks do. My guess is that alkyd paintings will outlast just about anything else anyway. My paintings are bulletproof. I will return to the subject of materials again as I have addressed only the basics here. I hope though I have told you enough for you to have a general understanding. I am trying not to be overly technical this early in the blog.

Some things I have seen

Here is a photo from my high school yearbook, that's me below the arrow!

I have been lucky enough to have known most of the professional landscape painters in this area and I have had the opportunity to paint alongside a good number of them. Many of them were a lot older than I was and I remember their kindness in allowing me to tag along. Outdoor landscape painters often work together and in groups, which makes it a little more social occupation than the more cloistered life of a studio painter.
I often feel like I am collecting butterfly's as I so enjoy meeting and painting with other artists. I photograph them and keep a file, someday it may be of use to some historian or will illustrate my memoirs.
I have spent much of my life as the proverbial fly on the wall and wandered through the last 35 years of New England's traditional painting world like those scenes from the movie Forrest Gump that drop him into all that archival footage. Unless you are a an art dealer or a keen student of New England painting you won't know all these names, but you will know some of them, come along and let me tell you about some things I have seen.
I have known for instance two students of Wlliam Merrit Chase (one who spoke of painting with Monet) and several students of Frank Vincent Dumond. I have known students of Raphael Soyer ( I found his summer home on an island off the coast of Maine), Robert Brachman, and Lester Stevens.
Besides the Ives Gammell era I was also present for the end of the Rockport art colony in the 80s and in the mid 70s saw for a summer. what I think was the last of the Provincetown art colony. Hans Hoffman had taken over Fredrick Waughs old house and was teaching there. Henry Hensche was then at the end of his long career. I saw Hensche do a demo of a head outside in sunlight.It was like watching him chop it out of a rainbow with an axe.. I painted that summer on the dunes with Robert Douglas Hunter. I slept each night in the studio once owned by Charles Hawthorne. Hunter and I sometimes drank adult beverages late into the night with"The Green Dolman", perhaps Paxtons finest portrait above the mantle looking down on us. There was a great Enneking of a woodland pool that is now in the Boston museum in that room as well. I took a seascape workshop from Charles Vickery,. what magic he could do, my wife made a carved and gilt sign about 8 feet long for him in return for a painting. What a lovely, kind and deeply religious man, he has been dead many years now. I remember him coming into the little gallery I had in Rockport in the early eighties and painting seascape demos for me at my own easel. He didn't say too much as he did it, but I kept telling myself, "remember this".
I helped the late Sam Rose find a William Kaula in an attic in the slums of Roxbury hidden behind a dusty old still life I think was a Harnett. I was given the left over frames from the Reynolds Beale estate, by his son. I have sat and drawn with the sculptor Walker Hancock in his studio and painted alongside Bernard Corey on numerous painting trips. I have stood in Harrison Cadys round studio and I have shuffled through Frank Beattys' illustrations for Popular Mechanics from the 1950s with the daughter of Tod Lindenmuth in the attic of a tavern from the early 1800s, the Anthony Cirino estate was up there too. I knew Helen Van Wyk, who taught so many about painting on her P.B.S.television show ,Welcome to my studio.
I have known Aldro T. Hibbards daughter and held Paul Manships' sons' hand as he lay dieing. and I was the punk who was along to hold up the paintings when Phillip Vose and Robert Hunter first opened the storeroom where the Paxton estate had lain unexamined for decades I was given a signed drawing by Paxton and later sold it for 100 dollars to buy groceries when I was starving. I have sat on a painting jury with Harry Ballinger, who was 100 years old and shown wet paintings against the wheel of my car to Neil Welliver out in the snowy woods of Maine.. I moved out of an apartment once and accidentally left behind a portfolio of 19th century academic figure drawings done at the Academie Julien by Charles Allen Winter. I have sat at a dinner table and listened to Alden Bryan reminisce about painting with Gruppe and Hibbard during the depression. I had breakfast with Ken Gore. I had lunch once with the late Charles Sovek.
I was the studio boy who unloaded the truck bearing the A. Laselle Ripley estate at the Guild of Boston artists in the mid 70s. I have had Winslow Homers watercolor kit in my hands. I have also painted with chrome colors from a paintbox unopened like a time capsule since the nineteen twenties. I studied with R.H. Gammell who met John Singer Sargent at the opera when introduced to him by Isabella Stewart Gardner. I have listened to Loring Coleman describe being entertained by the singing of John Carlson on cold winter evenings after he had spent the day painting in the mountains of Vermont with Chauncy Rider
I was taught to paint with real vermilon by a student of Fredrick Vinton in a studio once used by Tarbell and hung with Paxton paintings worth a fortune today and valueless then. I had drawing lessons from Richard Lack. I briefly attended the Art Students League when you could still smoke on the stairways. I met Gardner Cox in his studio. when he was painting the Kissinger portrait.
I visited Caproni, the cast makers when they were still making plaster casts from iron molds, in a warehouse in a frightening neighborhood under the elevated transit tracks on Washington street, in Boston. That was near where Simon and Aaron Willard made their banjo clocks. I have shaken the hand of Albert Sack. I have sat in an idling Plymouth Fury on a cabstand overtop the location of the Boston Massacre wearing a black leather jacket with a 12 inch crescent wrench in the pocket. I was wearing the high heeled boots of that era which made me six foot six, and I weighed one hundred and fifty two pounds, including the wrench.
I have copied Ingres drawings with the originals sitting on the table beside me. I have found painting locations all over New England used by Metcalf, Hibbard, Thieme, Gruppe and Luigi Lucionne, Carl Peters (I shuffled through the paintings in that estate as well) and Childe Hassam. I drove down a muddy rutted farm road to find the studio of Jay Conaway in Vermont. I have mourned at the grave of Charles Woodbury and held a dazzle painted wooden model battleship made by the artist Alfred Thayer when he invented camouflage during World War One. I have carried Theresa Bernstein in her wheelchair and learned how to precut rolls of canvas on a power saw from Paul Strisik.
I introduced myself to Tom Kinkaid at Art Expo who invited me to a party in Connecticut where I met James Gurney. I met Wayne Thiebaud once too, Benjamen Spock and Leo Kottke as well. I knew a man who was in a fistfight with Pietro Annigoni and another who studied with the great American sculptor Bella Pratt.
I saw Hendrix and Count Basie. I heard the Who, the Airplane, Spirit and Led Zeppelin play , and once had Herold Melvin and the Bluenotes smoke a joint in the cab I was driving. I saw Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, McCoy Tyner , Phil Woods, Joe Pass, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn.I heard Marty Robbins sing El Paso and walked out on Bob Dylan. Twice.
I was both the janitor and the president of the Rockport Art Association and the janitor of the Guild of Boston Artists as well. I have sat at the gate leg table used in Marguerite Pearsons paintings and discussed the silver leafing techniques of Max Keuhne with his son Bill. I wrote the forward to the Thieme book and helped stage a show of his work.
I have struggled to keep the mortgage paid and the car from being repossessed while putting two children through private school. I was a hippie and I went to a Military Academy.
Ives Gammells studio was now so long ago as to have taken on the glow of legend. I noticed a blog speaking of the dearth of technical information given in I believe, the Gerome atelier. I can assure you that Paxton and Gammell passed on that dearth of information to me , which I have carefully maintained till present. When people ask me if I teach I always reply ;" I don't know anything". What I did hear from Ives was how men like Paxton, Tarbell and Vinton, Enneking or Benson thought about what they did. These are some of the things I have seen along the way.

My palette 2

Here is a picture I painted this last fall in Jefforsonville,Vermont . I made this picture outside on a rainy day using only yellow ochre, ivory black, Indian red and white. That's an odd sort of a palette for an outdoor painter but I was trying to respond to the grayness of the day in a way that might give me a more interesting painting, its a 16x20.
In the last post I mentioned the chromatic versus earth color palette ideas and I have chosen to show this picture to illustrate an extreme opposite of the currently popular three color chromatic palettes. I actually worked on a three color chromatic palette for several years about 10 years ago, and there's a good story there too. It seems like everything I write, reminds me of something else I must write.
Onwards with the palette presentation continuing from the last post. You may want to refer back to My palette 1 for its' picture again.
Starting below the white on the left side of the palette is;

Gold ochre, another earth color, this is a slightly more yellow version of yellow ochre. You probably want yellow ochre here. but you might check out the golden version, Some companies make a yellow ocher light and deep as well. Raw sienna and mars yellow both fit into this slot on the palette. Like other earth colors this is a dependable workhorse of a color and I could mix nearly the same hue from chromatic colors but its nice to have it there and ready to use, and there is a nice sort of "acoustic" look to the earth colors. I once bought a tube of Sennelier yellow ochre and it was dirty and weak. I realized that I was so used to our modern lab made versions of this color I was unaware of what the real earth color of the old masters was like. Rembrandt would be very impressed with my palette, I am not so sure he would be that impressed with my paintings though.

Ultramarine blue. I use a lot of this, after white its the color of which I use the most. Sometimes I take it off my palette just for disciplines sake. It is a slightly reddish blue. My palette has a warm and a cool version of each hue. Ultramarine is my warm blue, Prussian is my cool blue. I prefer the ultramarine deep or the French ultramarine when a manufacturer gives me a choice. Good ultramarine has clarity, cheap ultramarine is dirty. Quality ultramarine is like butter and cheap ultramarine is slimy.

Viridian green is a lovely bluish green that has become very expensive in the last few years. Its quality has also dropped, it seems to me that it goes gritty on the palette much more quickly than it used to or should. RGH makes one and though they aren't giving it away it is still affordable. Viridian mixed with a lot of white is good in skies and a tolerable replacement for cerulean blue which has also become very expensive. Lately I have been experimenting with Thalo green deep, I am not sure if I can live with it as an inexpensive substitute for viridian or not. It is of course much more powerful.

Quinacridone red, I was taught to paint with alizirin crimson and in those days it was a standard artists pigment. It had many faults, it had a bloody, blacky sort of a color and was impermanent and handled poorly. Some years ago manufacturers began selling Permanent Alizirin which was of course not alizirin at all. It is usually quinacridone. The ideal color for this slot is probably genuine rose madder. That is a wonderful color, rather than being bloody like alizirin, it has an organic roseate hue that is warm, clear and lovely like roses themselves. When I was on a three color palette this was my red. It is about 35 dollars for a 37 ml. tube. This is, in my estimation, the best argument for being rich. Sometime when you feel flush, treat yourself to a tube of Winsor and Newtons' genuine rose madder, it is like a good box pressed maduro from the Dominican Republic, one of life's' finest experiences. I should mention I suppose that it is not entirely permanant.
Quinacridone isn't cheap either but it is roseate in hue, permanent and dependable. If you buy a tube of permanent rose this is what you will get. It wont stomp on your mixtures like some of the other cool red pigments, delicacy is the" pearl of great price" in the cool reds.

Lastly, Ivory black.. A lot of outdoor painters eschew the use of black and there's a good reason for that. In the hands of tyros (now there's an antique word) it brings on disaster. It is not to be used to make the shadow note by adding it to the color of an object in the light. THE SHADOW IS A SEPARATE COLOR FROM THE LIGHT, AND NOT THE COLOR OF THE LIGHT PLUS BLACK! It is virtually always better to add the compliment of a color to any note to reduce it. Black is only useful when perceived as a color of its own. Sometimes painters talk about painting clean, for them black is an anathema. Another philosophy thinks of putting the right color of mud in the right place. I fall into the latter camp. If a color is too red I add green, if it's to yellow I add purple, etc. That's sort of like the difference between playing a fretted instrument and playing a violin (which has no frets) I play across the colors rather than clearly hitting only the separate notes in each octave. See what I mean? Now I have to write a post on compound color vs. simple color. I will label that post inominate color. I sometimes do small black and white studies for larger paintings.
Well its bedtime and I'd better throw my palette out in the trunk of the car to keep it from drying out overnight! My wife and kids hate it when I put it in the refrigerator on top of the leftover pizza.

My Palette 1

Here's my palette. The colors don't photograph very accurately and your monitor throws in another variable. On my monitor the ultramarine blue is way too electric for instance. I have shown you this view of my palette to let you see how I arrange it. Here's a usual palette for me. It seems like every time I look down, it's different. Actually the core of the palette remains the same and I experiment with a few additions and variations . These are of course, oil paints. When I look at a great historical painting in the museum and wonder "why can't I do that" I want to know the difference between that work and mine is my ability, and not my materials. If the problem is my materials, that's easy to fix. If the problem is my ability, I can work on that too, if I have the right materials. As I have said in a previous post , all of my colors are from RGH artists oils. Here's what I've got on there.

starting from the top going across to the right:
Titanium white
cadmium yellow light
cadmium yellow medium
cadmium red light
burnt sienna
cobalt violet
Prussian blue

and on the left descending;
Golden, or yellow ochre
ultramarine blue
Viridian, or sometimes pthalo green
Quinacridone red
Ivory black

I will go through this list and write briefly about each of these colors;

Titanium white, the standard artists white these days, opaque and nonpoisonous, that white stuff on your lifeguards nose is titanium. Lefranc and Bourgeois makes a really nice titanium that's very reasonably priced. Some artists like zinc white because it's more transparent and they feel it doesn't overwhelm their colors making them chalky. Some brands of paint are a mixture of titanium and zinc and try to get the best qualities of both. Lead white is somewhat transparent as well, it dries more quickly than the others and handles better than the others. It gives a nice surface and is the white in all the old paintings in the museum. It is poisonous and is becoming harder to find.

Cadmium yellow light, or pale. Never buy a tube that says hue on it! A hue is some unknown pigments mixed up to look like the color you actually want. If you want azo yellow (or French's mustard) buy tubes labeled that way. Manufacturers sell these to students and hobbyists who don't know the difference. They won't handle reliably in your mixtures and lack pigmenting strength. Student grades of paint often are hues. Painting well is hard enough to do with the best of materials.

Cadmium yellow medium, more orange and warmer than the cadmium yellow light. I can live without this by feeding a little cadmium red light into my cadmium yellow light, but it is convenient having it and it helps me to get greater variety when mixing greens. There is a lot of variation between makers and some makers' cadmium yellow medium may be the same color as another makers' cadmium yellow deep.

Cadmium red light, this is an expensive pigment, but a tube will last you a long time. All the cadmiums are poisonous . Don't eat or smoke while they are on your hands. Never put these in a spray gun, and I would recommend you never work with this pigment in a powdered form (such as grinding your own paint, let the pros do that). Used responsibly they are safe. Most of the things in an artists' studio are poisonous to one degree or another. I was taught to paint with real vermilion in this slot on the palette, that is mercuric sulphide and is really, really poisonous and nearly impossible to get these days however it was a lovely color. When you see the blush in the cheek of a woman painted by John Sargent, that's vermilion. Often your red is going to be used to "step on " ie. modify another color slightly and vermilion did that nicely. There are some nice proprietary reds that are possibles in this spot on the palette. Sennelier red is a nice one. Rembrandt also makes a nice red in this range. I don't see a good replacement for the cadmium yellows but you may decide to choose a substitute for cadmium red light. The important thing is that this is a warm red, you will have a cool red on the other side of the palette.

Burnt sienna, is an absolutely wonderful color! It is inexpensive. Earth colors are (or rather were) colored dirt dug up in various places in Italy, and are mostly forms of iron oxide. They are made in the lab today and are, I think, far better than the real earth pigments. These are reliable, permanent and well behaved colors.They dry relatively quickly. I like to sketch paintings in with burnt sienna. Some artists who choose to use limited palettes and work on a chromatic palette don't use earth colors. Some of the western painters have popularized this approach lately. I will talk about limited palettes in another post. Oddly enough the old masters had just the opposite sort of palette and worked with three color earth palettes. There's a lot of different ways to skin the same cat, each has its limitations and advantages. My palette has both an earth color palette and a chromatic palette within it. Winsor and Newton makes a nice burnt sienna. Since burnt sienna is a relatively inexpensive color buy a good one.

Cobalt violet, an extremely expensive color. I love it, but I can't say you really need to have it. Its got a lovely sort of glow that no other violet has. Dioxizine has far more tinting strength. I feel dioxizine has too much in fact, and will actually stain the hairs in your brushes. Most of the proprietary violets on the market are dioxizine, often toned down to make them more manageable. You can mix your violets over on the other side of the palette with ultramarine and quinacridone or alizirin. Gamblin makes a less expensive cobalt violet and it is fine.

Prussian blue, This blue leans slightly towards green. It is not a real popular color these days having been largely replaced with thalo blue. I use Prussian because it is more manageable, thalo blue being so much more powerful than the other pigments on your palette that it can be over assertive in mixtures. Many fine painters have relied on it though. Emile Gruppe used it extensively as the blue in his chromatic palette. Most of the proprietary blues labeled with the makers name are thalo.
Neither of these colors is particularly expensive so you may want to try a small tube of both. Like cobalt violet you may decide you don't need this color either.

Thats it for today. I will talk about the other half of the palette in the next post.