People are always asking me about art techniques. One of the most frequent questions Im asked is about the technique of glazing in oil paint [glazing is the use of a semi-transparent paint that is applied over a dry layer of paint to alter or build up the density of a colour]. It is time to destroy a myth. The fact is that hardly any great artist ever used this technique to build up an entire image, particularly any portrait, and most especially Leonardos Mona Lisa (his famous sfumato technique was NOT done with glazing!). And yet this myth persists because for some mysterious reason this technique has cast a magical spell over people and no one questions if it is actually true. People talk about layers and layers of glazes but this is simply RUBBISH! All the scientific and historical evidence is that the technique of glazing was used far more rarely than people think, and yet this myth is still repeated over and over again. It is said that all the old masters used it and it was the secret to their success. This cannot be true. Usually this myth is perpetuated by art historians who cant paint and only make guesses - or artists who like to puff up the mystery of the artistic process into something far more complicated and arcane and it actually is - or ever was. It is a fact that all through art history until recent times that glazing oil paints has meant using a thickened oil (or mixture using thickened oil) to apply the glazes, usually linseed oil that has been heated in the absence of air (when it is called stand oil in English). This oil is thick and treacly, usually looking and behaving like honey. This might be mixed with various solvents to make it more manageable, but this thickened oil is usually the active and useful ingredient for glazing. The problem is that it can take a very long time to dry, even with various ingredients added to it to speed up the drying. Whilst it is drying it remains sticky and it easily attracts dust. Even when it is dry it leaves a slightly rubbery surface that it is not easy to paint over because of the fatty nature of the surface. All these are reasons why it is a myth that all the old masters used it a lot and that they used it to build up flesh tones in portraits etc. They were self-employed businessmen that supplied a product for sale, they did not have time to wait a year or more for each painting to dry before they could sell it. 99% of the time when people say that paintings by many famous artists such as Vermeer used glazing they are wrong. Most of the time they painted their pictures carefully with a wet-in-wet technique, meaning that all the colours you see were still wet and the quality you see comes simply from enormous and very subtle control over the way they used their paint; it is NOT done with glazing wet paints over dry. Look at the eyes in this Van Dyck portrait of Cornelius Van der Geest, this could NOT have been done by glazing, despite what people say. Many old masters would have had some kind of underpainting at the start of making their paintings, but this not was done to assist the process of glazing except very rarely. Van Dyck is interesting, because he did use glazing sparingly, but only on the clothes he painted, for example to give the colour of his vivid crimson clothing in this self-portrait greater depth and intensity. Nevertheless, I can assure you that most of his work and that of the old masters was NOT done with glazing! This rant is now over.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 09:09:14 +0000
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