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How to paint permanent pictures

Chapter 14: OILS AND MEDIUMS
By Maximilian Toch
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About This Book

The work presents practical guidance for artists on selecting and using pigments, vehicles, supports, and varnishes to produce durable paintings. It explains simple and complex palettes, permanent foundations, preparation of wood and metal supports, and the properties of oils, tempera, watercolors, waxes and mediums. The author discusses common causes of deterioration—fading, darkening, cracking, peeling—and prescribes materials and techniques to prevent them, including labeling and sequence of application. Chapters cover specific problem pigments to avoid, varnishes and blooms, repainting, restoration and cleaning, and framing. Advice is technical but conveyed in plain language to help painters and collectors produce and preserve long-lasting work.

OILS AND MEDIUMS

THERE are on sale a very large number of Mediums for use in oil painting, some of which are essential, but most of which are unnecessary; and, for certain purposes, unreliable. The materials generally on sale—and this is not a complete list—are:

  • Poppy Oil.
  • Linseed Oil.
  • Walnut Oil.
  • Nut Oil.
  • Pale Drying Oil.
  • Dark Drying Oil.
  • Spirits of Turpentine.
  • Petroleum Naphtha.
  • Amber Varnish.
  • Copal Varnish.
  • Japan Oil Size.
  • Mastic Varnish.
  • Megilp Varnish.
  • Damar Varnish.

and other materials, the compositions of many of which are kept a secret and are sold under proprietary names. As a matter of fact, the painter can get along perfectly, and will have permanent results, if he sticks to Raw Linseed Oil, Turpentine and one Varnish, either Mastic or Damar. I do not mean to say that a Medium like Copal Varnish mixed with certain colors is not a good Medium, for such a material will produce enamel paints which will have a permanent gloss, but when you come to consider that the Old Masters had only from seven to ten pigments ground in a drying oil like Linseed Oil, and that most of their paintings are to-day a complete example of permanence, there should be no reason why the mind of the painter should be clouded with a multiplicity of materials and why many materials should be used which may in time prove detrimental.

Without going into any scientific dissertation on the subject, if you take a strong drier and mix it with many pigments like Umber, Zinc and the Siennas, you will have, apparently, a perfectly dry picture in twelve hours, but you must bear in mind that the drying process, once started with these powerful driers, goes on sometimes for years, until finally the paint disintegrates, because too much drier has been used. It is, of course, oftentimes essential to use plenty of drier, or to use Copal Varnish as a Medium, in order to finish the work so that it can be handled with safety for illustrative uses, but where a painter has a commission to paint a portrait, it its far wiser to use the simple palette and to reduce only with Turpentine and Raw Linseed Oil and let the sun and air dry his picture slowly, normally and naturally.