Art & Perception

I guess it’s natural for a photographer working in black and white to notice where things fall on the continuum between the two. Though all shades of gray are lovable, it’s more the extremes that seem to win my heart. It’s the attraction of pure yin and yang. It’s therefore a special delight when winter brings a reversal of this duality in one of my favorite subjects, namely streams and their ilk. Once there’s snow on the ground and ice forming on the bank, the water itself turns dark, just the opposite of the typical summer pattern of white water amid dark rocks or ground. Since a trip a couple months back along a local stream after the first big snowfall, I’ve been contemplating a series I tentatively called Black water. The early images didn’t seem especially promising, but I never found time to take a good crack at it.

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Consider this in essence a technical report.

This cutout is a scan of our living room using a laser distance finder. The laser was attached to a fixture which allowed it to be rotated around a common center. I pointed the laser at a feature of interest, such as an edge or intersection. The pointed direction and distance to the interrupting surface were then recorded by dots on an expanded pvc board. The dots were then connected and the resulting shape cut into what you see.

It doesn’t look like a self-respecting room. The jagged appearance is the product of the permanent features coupled with the disposition of furniture and nick knacks. In some cases the distance into an adjacent room would exceed the limits of the board and would result in a squared-off termination.

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Do you use turpentine? Do you wish you didn’t have to? I can use turpentine in the studio in winter, with the windows closed, but it’s not something I would like to do every day. Turpentine, even a small amount, can give me a headache. I am happy that turpentine (or some other organic solvent) is not a normal part of my oil painting technique.

Turpentine has two basic roles in modern painting: as a thinner for the paint to allow a flowing application, and for the purpose of cleaning brushes.

However, turpentine did not play that important a role in the history of Western Art. Certainly it was not much used before the 18th century, so painters before then (like Jan van Eyck and Rembrandt) must have gotten by without the turps.

But how could they work without turpentine? I learned, through reading translations of old manuscripts, and looking at paintings depicting artists at work, that the old masters used a different approach to cleaning and storing their brushes. For both purposes, they used linseed oil, the same oil they painted with. As to how to apply paint without using turpentine, I’ll write about that in another post.

Here is how I store my oil painting brushes in a tray of linseed oil.

various brushes stored in linseed oil

I discuss storing brushes in linseed oil in more detail on my own website.

Cleaning brushes with linseed oil is fast and easy (again, the linked page goes into more detail).

seven dabs of oil to clean the brush

A big advantage to this approach: it permits me, in a crunch, to clean up a painting session quickly by putting the unwashed brushes back into the linseed oil. This is not the way to treat brushes well, because they will eventually dry under oil, so I make sure to clean them the next day, but it does buy me flexibility in my work schedule. This kind of flexibility sometimes is the difference between painting and not painting.

Safety tip: Keep in mind, linseed oil releases heat as it dries in the presence of oxygen. Keep rags with linseed oil on them in a sealed metal container.

Would you paint more if you didn’t have to use turpentine? Would you paint more if you could clean your brushes more easily?

Other posts by Karl:
What does it take to be a dealer?
Fall of the Art World
Art school controversy
Is Art School Worthless?

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