Before music took over my life, the Visual Arts were my thing.
I can’t remember exactly when (who can) but there was a point in my childhood, somewhere around grade four or five, where I realized that, yes I could draw, but also that I could draw really, really well.
I worked to learn what I could from elementary teachers who were good at encouragement but for whom arts and crafts was a minor concern in the curricula they had to teach. Past that, I fumbled around trying to teach myself what I could; copying comics (I got really good at drawing Garfield) and flipping through the “How to draw…” books I’d check out from the school library.
At first, I never really focused on painting. Sure, I did a little here and there but colour for me was pencil crayons and, sometimes, cheap, water based tempera.
Then there were two things that changed all of this.
Bill Alexander
From 1974 to 1982, Bill Alexander had a half hour show called The Magic of Oil Painting. I discovered it on via re-runs on PBS in the early 80’s and, every Sunday morning I watched it religiously.
Alexander was a fun, chubby German guy with his Almighty Brush and his Happy Little Trees 1 and he finished whole landscapes in under thirty minutes.
I tried to reproduce his paintings using what I had on hand, which was regular, water based tempera on newsprint paper. While it’s the thought that counts, I can say these early attempts didn’t turn out overly great. It’s near impossible to do wet on wet painting with a medium that dries in minutes. It did, however, get me into using one and two inch house painting brushes and realizing that you didn’t have to paint every leaf on every tree, or every feather on every bird.
Eventually, my folks bought me some oils and some canvas boards and away I went.
The first painting I did in this medium was a cardinal; sitting on a branch with a blue background. I may have tried to add clouds in using a fan brush (like Alexander did, of course), but I honestly can’t remember.
I did try a couple of Alexander style wet on wet landscapes but I don’t recall having much success.
You can find The Magic of Oil Painting on YouTube.
Robert Bateman
When I was young, I aspired to be Robert Bateman. And I tried. Goddamnit I tried. I spent untold hours in the basement, at my easel drawing and painting birds, animals, and the landscapes they inhabited. Some were good, some were not so good, but it was me, dreaming and trying and learning.
While I’m not what you’d call a sentimental fellow, nor am I overly nostalgic, there is one main item from my childhood that I’ve kept: an oil painting I did of a wolverine when I was thirteen:
While it seems very basic to me now, I was excited at the time; the fur on the back and haunches kind of looked like fur and not muddy, blobby crap.
I’d met Robert Bateman about a year and half before at a signing he was doing at a local mall gallery. I’d taken in a sheet of some pencil drawings of horses I had done. He looked at them, gave me some advice (drawing is good, but I should be painting if that’s what I wanted to do), signed my copy of The World Of Robert Bateman, and I went on my way.
In November ’86, he was back doing another meet and greet. I put my wolverine painting in a plastic bag and off I went. Let me tell you, it pleased me to no end that he remembered me!
“You’re the kid who brought in the drawings of the horses the last time I was here!”
I said, “Yes, and you told me that I should be painting.”
“And are you?”
I said yes, and took my painting out of the bag. He put on his glasses, took my painting and exclaimed, “Oh! A wolverine!”
We chatted for a few minutes, he said I was on the right track and to keep at it. I asked him if he’d sign my painting, which he graciously did.
That wolverine was one of the last paintings I did using oil. That summer I’d painted a couple of small landscapes and two paintings of loons, one of which is, I believe, still in the main store at a lakeside trailer camp the family stayed at during the summer, and the other one is somewhere in my dad’s house, I think.
This wolverine (along with various drawings and tempra based paintings I had done at school – one being a reproduction of this) was part of my portfolio when I applied for a school of the arts. The panel asked me what I thought I wanted to do as an arts career and I proudly showed them my wolverine oil painting that had “best wishes” from Motherfucking Robert Bateman, and told them I wanted to do wildlife painting.
I passed the audition and the following school year, the Art teachers went to work on opening my mind to the entire world of Visual Arts.
Sadly, while there, I also did ninety-nine percent of my painting in acrylic. The one exception: was a process called encaustic. I brought what I thought were my last tubes of oil into class and I squeezed the paints into containers of hot, melted wax then went to town pouring it all onto a large canvas as part of a project in abstraction. Past that, yeah. Just acrylic.
I did hand painted t-shirts for a while. All acrylic.
Some wildlife canvases. Acrylic.
A few, little one offs. Acrylic.
Then one evening in 1997 (or was it ’98?) I found some old tubes of oil paint stuffed away in a box at the back of a closet. I took them downstairs with me, found a small piece of plywood, and painted this:
Its creation was so spontaneous that I didn’t even use brushes. I just squeezed the paint out of the tubes directly onto the wood, then went at it with the end of a pencil. While I can’t remember how long it took me, I do remember that I completed it in a single sitting.
That was the last, fully finished painting I did, oil or otherwise, because the next year I discovered stupid computers and stupid Photoshop and became hooked.
Everything pretty much went to shit Visual Arts wise and I haven’t seriously picked up a paintbrush since.
Fast forward to this year. Among everything that’s been going on, I started to get an itch; the feeling that I’d been away from certain parts of who I am for far too long. I just got my head buried in tech and rarely came up for air.
I had also been taking a look back through this blog and its overall theme has become backing away from tech; to use computers as the tools that they are, giving up that which is truly not important and getting back to what truly is important.
Part of this is my want and need to start going more analog. In among trying to stay off the smartphone, buying records, and reading books rather than “social” websites, I wanted to start painting again. And I wanted to paint using oils.
Oil paint just has a feel, you know? It’s got this crazy texture to it that cannot be replicated by acrylic no matter how much gesso you mix in with it. And no matter what the tech companies say, you absolutely cannot reproduce the feel of working with oil (or any paint for that matter) on a fucking iPad. 2
You have to really understand oil paint and be patient with it. Oil takes a long, long, long time to dry. You can’t just put a layer on and then start a second layer right away… well you can but you run the risk of smearing, unless that’s what you’re going for in which case, awesome.
You have to be deliberate with oils. You can just go for it, but mistakes are usually more difficult to fix, if fixing things is your bag. However, mistakes can unlock an entirely new way for you to look at your art, and your method of painting. You realize that you can manipulate oils in a way that other mediums don’t really allow.
For me, oil paint allows you to just go for the ride, rules be damned.
And that’s how last month I found myself in an art supply store buying paints, brushes, mediums, and canvas.
And one afternoon, I started to paint. Nothing planned. I wanted to just go for it.
I started slow. Would I still like this? I dabbed a little paint on the canvas. It was neat doing this again. The smell alone caused memories to flood back.
At first, it was tentative. You can see at the top how the paint seems to appear slightly washed out, like I was using a thinner even though I’d made a conscience decision not to use thinner.
I started adding more paint to my brush and the swirls happened; milky blue and white clouds that I kept going back over because the paint doesn’t dry and you can just keep on manipulating.
Slightly bigger brush. More paint. Vertical slashes that start to look like posts. Lay it on thick, two rows. Slightly bigger brush. Two more rows… fuck it, add a third row, make some diagonal like they’re leaning over
And here I am, still working on this. I have no idea what the end will be but let me tell you that it feels like I’ve gotten more emotional value out of painting three colours over one third of a canvas than I have from all the digital art I’ve done in the past twenty plus years.
With all the ballyhoo horseshit around AI, I feel it’s more important than ever to get back to basics, get your hands dirty. Rather than sign up for some piece of shit service that does nothing but spit out images (or music or writing) based on whatever ridiculous shit you can type into a text field, buy some paints and brushes and really create something.
You’ll feel better. I promise.
1: Bob Ross ripped this guy off wholesale. Words cannot express how unreasonably fucking angry I was when I first saw Joy Of Painting.
2: Sure, you can do cool shit on an iPad using apps like Medibang Paint (now Mediabang Pro, I guess?) and ProCreate but lemme tell you, they will never be close to the feel of actually painting. I really tried to convince myself otherwise, yet I haven’t touched the iPad in at least five years.