Acquisition of New Paint Leads to New Painting!

It is remarkable how much paint I go through in a year! When I first bought a set of oils, it was a grand purchase. I still remember walking into an art store in Santa Cruz and carefully selecting my first collection of colors. It was sometime in the early 90's, and the $300 I spent felt like a huge luxury.

Shiny new tubes!

Before that I worked in gouache mostly, which is opaque watercolor. Most paints use the same pigments but differ in the binders. Oils use poppyseed or linseed oil as a binder. Gouache uses chalk. Acrylic uses plastic.

In school I used acrylic paints as it's easy to acquire a set of student grade colors for mere pittance. They looked fine when wet, but then dried to a dull memory of my original vision for a painting. When you are student, you pretty much suck anyway. It takes a lot of time and practice to create work that merit the use of fancy paints! Or so I've always felt.

My first set of oils, eked out sparingly in careful, often uncertain brushstrokes, lasted for years. I painted on weekends, evenings, and over vacations, and most of it was pretty awful!
It was a lot of time and sacrifice for something that most people around me didn't understand. Artists do tend to be the sensitive introverts, and I'm no exception.

I kept at it because on rare occasions a piece would emerge that finally said the thing I was trying to say with stunning eloquence and beauty. All those years of observation and thought, things I could never express, finally came out. It was as though I could at last show what my heart and mind felt. Not that I usually have much more to say than "see, the world is beautiful!" But I do often feel that people are too much in a rush, or too caught up in the minutiae of life to observe the world around them. Is that not profound enough?

Since beginning my adventure of being a full-time artist in 2003, I've had to buy more paint. Once I actually spent $6000 on paint in a single year! Back then I was repainting a lot, so it took much more paint to produce a year's worth of paintings. Many of my paintings would have 2 or 3 paintings underneath. I still do that, but far less. I seem to get it right the first time much more often these days.

Recently I treated myself to a set of shiny new Charvin oil paints in exotic pre-mixed colors! And they are lovely. Traditionally I've used a restricted palette, which is often recommended for plein-air painting as it simplifies your life. Even though I often paint completely abstract work, the habit of using a traditional palette has held. Sometimes I find a weird shade that really appeals to me but is not a classic hue straight out of the spectrum (Naples yellow comes to mind, and now it's lead-free!)

Before I start a painting, I will often spend an hour or two just mixing paint. It seemed strange to me to buy premixed colors straight out of the tube, but then Charvin has some gorgeous hues that only need a slight bit of graying or whitening to be straight out of nature. So after some hesitation, I decided to try something new. I've found that these premixed colors have inspired me to use purples in a new way, which is rather exciting.