Want to know how some of the 20th century’s most celebrated artists made abstract paintings? This course offers an in-depth, hands-on look at the materials, techniques, and thinking of seven New York School artists, including Willem de Kooning, Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko. Through studio demonstrations and gallery walkthroughs, you’ll form a deeper understanding of what a studio practice means and how ideas develop from close looking, and you’ll gain a sensitivity to the physical qualities of paint. Readings and other resources will round out your understanding, providing broader cultural, intellectual, and historical context about the decades after World War II, when these artists were active. The works of art you will explore in this course may also serve as points of departure to make your own abstract paintings. You may choose to participate in the studio exercises, for which you are invited to post images of your own paintings to the discussion boards, or you may choose to complete the course through its quizzes and written assessments only. Learners who wish to participate in the optional studio exercises may need to purchase art supplies. A list of suggested materials is included in the first module. Learning Objectives: Learn about the materials, techniques, and approaches of seven New York School artists who made abstract paintings. Trace the development of each artist’s work and studio practice in relation to broader cultural, intellectual, and historical contexts in the decades after World War II. Hone your visual analysis skills. Use each artist’s works as a point of departure for making your own abstract paintings.
1.6 In the Studio: Oil Paint
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From the course by The Museum of Modern Art
In the Studio: Postwar Abstract Painting
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From the lesson
Introduction
Meet the Instructors
Corey D'AugustineArt conservator, technical art historian, and artist
Department of Education
So today's lesson is going to be a primer, so to speak, on oil painting.
In other words, what is the paint?
How do you do it?
Where do you mix it?
What does what, and so on.
I'm actually not going to do any painting today, I'm just going to talk about how
to push paint around, how to mix paint and what all this fun stuff in front of me is.
So, again, this is a video you might want to come back to in a couple weeks when you
say what the hell was he talking about, that dryer stuff?
What is that again?
So, hopefully, this is going to be a useful one.
This is the kind of pallet, by the way, that I suggested you get.
It's, I don't know, what is it, aluminum?
I don't know what.
It's a butcher's tray.
The kind of thing that you could, well slice meat on I suppose.
In our case we're going to mix paint on it.
And it's nice because it's hard so it's easy to clean.
You can scrape it, scratch it, no problem.
It also has these walls on it.
So you're not going to have medium or
solvent flooding off and ruining your rug or wherever you are.
So Well, what is paint again?
Paint in the tube, what is this?
It's Grumbacher Academy, means it's the student quality of Grumbacher,
it is zinc yellow hue, what is this stuff?
It's pigment, which is zinc yellow hue, it's binder, which is linseed oil,
and there's probably a little bit of solvent in there, which is turpentine, or
in our case Probably mineral spirits, odorless mineral spirits, a weaker solvent
than turpentine but one that has zero toxicity or almost zero toxicity.
And it's not going to stink up your house or your garage or what have you.
And what does that stuff look like?
Well, it looks something like that.
Look at that!
Nice and gooey because it was a fresh tube.
And a lot of that medium, that linseed oil,
rose to the top as it was probably sitting at the store like this for a long time.
So this is going to be a very medium rich first paint application.
That's okay, I just want to make sure that I re-stir that
to get it homogenous before painting most likely.
So to do that.
A pallet knife is usually the easiest way to do it.
So, like so
I am just remixing that paint since it had settled out a little bit in the tubes.
It is very common for the first time that you use any given tube of paint.
Now medium I mentioned is this stuff, linseed oil.
Linseed oil you'll recall is a drying oil It yellows slightly upon drying,
yellows slightly more over time.
But it's relatively clear and this is useful for making your paint more fluid,
but on the canvas making glazes.
Because this stuff is mostly translucent.
You're basically pushing your, little particles of pigment further apart so
that, you're seeing through that paint.
You're taking a finite amount of color, essentially, and
spreading it in a certain thickness you can see through.
So, I am going to go ahead and just add just a touch of that.
And this becomes very much like Something you might do in the kitchen.
And what I'm doing now is again just remixing that.
And you can see on my palette
that already the viscosity of that paint has lowered quite dramatically.
And if I were to apply this,
there's a certain amount of translucence in that paint that I would apply that
would not be present if I just applied it in the thickness provided out of the tube.
Backtracking for
one second, Academy, it's a student color, a student paint, if you will.
what that means is, there's less pigment in here than in the artist grade stuff.
Why? because pigment's the expensive part.
So a big tube of paint.
If it's a student grade, its going to have less pigment, less covering power,
less opacity than your artist quality paint.
But it's cheaper.
This word right here is in important one.
Zinc yellow hue.
Zinc yellow is an actual little rock.
That's a mineral pigment that comes from zinc and happens to be yellow.
Zinc yellow hue says that it's something that is the same color as that but
is an organic substitute.
It's something cheaper.
Roughly the same color, but probably not the same opacity.
Zinc yellow is relatively opaque, again,
we're talking about a mineral, it's a metal.
Zinc. You know what it is, probably.
Hue, clues you into the fact that it's an organic substitute for
that, and almost all organic pigments are quite transparent.
Now if you go on the back, all colormen, or color companies,
will tell you different things, but what we see here is the first one,
semi-opaque vehicle, alkali, refined linseed oil.
Okay, interesting, so, the binder is linseed oil,
well, we already knew that, so that's not really telling us anything.
Pigment arylide yellow, 10G PY3.
Okay forget the last part, that's technical data to identify that pigment.
The first part arylide that's an organic yellow.
So that tells you what the zinc yellow hue is,
by the way there's no zinc in here at all.
And finally light fastening is two very good,
well They say it's not going to yellow on you, well it's yellow already.
It's not going to fade on you, take it with a grain of salt.
If a manufacturer says its great well maybe it's good,
if they say it's good then maybe it's so-so.
What about all this other stuff, how about thinning with solvent, what does that do?
It's good to save a jar or something that has a lid on it so
you can reuse your solvent week after week.
I'm just going to add a little splash.
[SOUND] This, by the way, is how to clean your brushes.
We'll get to that in a moment.
It's also how, let's choose a different color now,
thin your paint in a different direction.
This is cobalt blue hue.
Keyword is an organic noncobalt containing color that looks sort of like cobalt blue.
And what I'm going to do is clean the yellow off my brush, or
pallet knife rather.
And then add a touch of solvent.
Or more than a touch.
So I'm now blending that,
thinning that paint again and ignoring this overpour here.
This part of the paint here looks Somewhat like what I've done already.
It looks like a thinned watered down version of the paint.
The difference is, all of this solvent,
when I paint with it is going to evaporate.
So this oil here, which is going to stay as a glaze, a measurable thickness
of paint edition That's not the case with the solvent which totally evaporates.
So, here I've made something that's going to be richer, glossier, and
more translucent.
Here I've made something that is going to act like a stain,
it's something that is going to be absorbed into the priming,
or into the support, rather than sitting up, proud of it.
In addition, It's not going to have that translucence of a glaze,
rather, it's going to have a little bit of a scattered kind of effect,
because you've pushed that paint further.
Because it's almost like a water consistency.
It is very low viscosity, and
you're staining your surface rather than building paint up onto it.
Alright, what's this other stuff here.
Varnish, this is dammar varnish.
It comes from trees.
It's a resin varnish.
You probably already know it could be the last thing you do with our painting if
you choose.
To seal the entire painting with a varnish.
Or to locally apply varnish here and there.
It's very glossy.
It unifies your paint film.
New York School painters often mix it in to their paint in lieu of linseed oil.
The difference being that this would act like linseed oil, that it's translucent.
You make a glaze with it.
But it's a whole lot more glossy.
So go ahead and experiment with that if you'd like.
Introduce another material called Venetian turpentine.
Kind of confusing since this isn't really like the turpentine solvent at all.
Rather, it has kind of a sticky honey-like consistency,
which I will just pour out a dab of so you can see.
And you can see it really, really does act like honey.
And what it does to your paint, well, it makes it act a little bit like honey.
It makes it thicker.
It makes it slower.
It makes it stickier.
Essentially you change the handling properties of your paint.
That if you want to have a globular blobby kind of surface.
If you want your paint to be thick but also translucent then you could substitute
this Venetian turpentine instead of linseed oil.
Much slower.
You can see it dripping like molasses or honey.
A much slower paint vehicle than linseed oil.
Or, you could use poppy oil.
Poppy oil is very similar to linseed oil, in that it's a drying oil.
It's a slower drying oil.
Meaning that it's going to stay wet for a long time.
What's the upshot?
Well, maybe you want it to stay wet for a while.
But certainly, the upshot is that it yellows less than linseed oil.
So if you're working with a white color and you want to keep it really crisp
white, go ahead and thin it into a glaze with poppy oil rather than linseed oil.
Conversely, if you want to speed the drying time of your paint,
if you're layering oil paints one over another and you want to work wet over dry,
but you're in a rush...
You can add a little bit of the cobalt dryer.
Interesting stuff, this does have cobalt in it.
A little goes a long way, so really, a just a tiny, in fact,
I'm not even going to add it to the paint,
we're going to add it to the corner of my palate.
And that little drip there, I'll show it to you in a second.
This little amount of cobalt here, this little bit of purple is really plenty for
that entire amount of paint.
So I'm going to go ahead and mix that in.
And what I've done in doing so, is actually to change the color ever so
slightly because the stuff is purple.
That's another reason why you don't want to use too much of it.
But, I've probably sped the drying time by,
I don't know, 30%, 50%, something like that.
What happens if you use too much?
Well, it turns purple on you, and if you're working with a yellow or a white,
that can be annoying.
Also, if you use too much, you're paint film is going to dry and
crack as it dries.
Meaning that there's too much dryer in there for
that paint film to stay flexible as it dries.
So, again, better err on the lower side unless you're in some crazy rush and you
gotta hang your painting at the gallery the next day or something like that.
But I don't advise that.
And finally, this one doesn't have a label just cause it's mine.
Take my word for it.
This is lavender oil.
Smells amazing, like lavender.
This is kind of the opposite of a dryer.
This is something that's barely a drying oil.
It does dry, but it takes a long, long time.
So I could add just a couple of drops of this into my oil paint,
if I wanted to keep it wet for a really long time.
Now, how long does this stay wet?
I can't tell you exactly.
You have to figure that out for yourself.
But, again, a little goes a long way.
If you had a lot of this stuff, your paint film might stay wet,
I mean wet to the touch, for month and months, perhaps even a year.
So, really, really quickly,
just an introduction to the world of oil paint here.
And then finally, how do you clean your brush or your pallet knife in this case?
Well knives are super easy to clean.
You can really just squeeze something, some paper towels or some
canvas around it, and get almost all of it off and it looks almost as good as new.
If you have a brush, you'd swish it around in your solvent for
a while, knock it off on the edges, get most of the paint out of there,
then go to your towel or whatever, get as much out as possible.
And then finally, that last step, soap and water.
And again, allow your bristles of the brush to dry with the bristle pointing up,
so that they don't dry pointing down in kind of a smashed orientation.
Because, that's the way it's going to stay.
So, go ahead and
if you have any questions about this stuff, feel free to ask in the discussion.
Really, the critical thing to understand today is the difference between
this binder.
Or, really, any binder addition.
And adding solvents to your paint, what they do, and you're going to get
a really good sense of that once you start working in your own studio.
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