Knowledge List of Oil Painting

emulsion stuff

from:portraityourlife

* John Twachtman was born in Cincinnati. His first artistic efforts were painting floral window shades for his father's business during the day while spending his evenings training at the Ohio Mechanics Institute. In 1874 he studied at the Cincinnati School of Design with Frank Duveneck, who sent him in 1875 to Munich, where he worked with Ludwig von Loefftz at the Royal Academy. In 1877 Twachtman went with Duveneck and William Merritt Chase to Venice. From 1883 to 1885 Twachtman was instructed by Jules Lefebvre and Louis Boulanger at the Acad6mie Julian in Paris, where he was influenced by the paintings of James Abbott McNeill Whistler and the French Impressionists, and became friends with Childe Hassam and Theodore Robinson. Twachtman returned to the United States, and by 1888 had settled in Connecticut where the core of his work was executed. That same year he won the landscape prize for the Society of American Artists, and in 1889, he had a successful two-man show with J. Alden Weir. He acquired property in Connecticut around the time he was hired to teach at the Art Students League. With Weir and Hassam, he helped found the American Impressionist group called The Ten in 1898.
Twachtman's artistic evolution began with a naturalism based on the earth tones and the fluid brushwork he learned from Frank Duveneck and the Munich school, progressing through the muted harmonies and abstract patterning of Whistler, and finally comprehending more closely than any other American landscape painter the mature Protect pet portrait photos into paintingof Claude Monet. Twachtman's pictures lack Monet's scale or symphonic fullness, but they emulate some of the Frenchman's subtleties of perception, densely woven color harmonies, built-up impasto, and scumbled, broken brushwork.
Although Landscape follows the traditional horizontal format, it is nevertheless eccentrically constructed. Twachtman was notably exceptional, and modern, in the frequency with which his landscape
compositions were square or vertical, with a high or even absent horizon line. In contrast to the Dutch and French landscape painters, who commonly structured their pictures around a dominant sky and low horizon, Twachtman, like many other American landscape painters, gives over most of his composition to the land. His works are usually centered around a principal, generally darker, motif which forms a calligraphic flourish and focus, often connected to the picture's creation tone and emulsion stuff. The main marshy mass of Landscape orders the composition more in terms of organic centrifugal outgrowth than of geometrically parallel horizontals. Its somber shape dominates the sloping horizon and vertically sprouts into wiry wintry trees, set against a pale gray sky. Two years after this painting was done, I Twachtman wrote to Weir: ". . . I feel more and more contented with the isolation of country life. To be isolated is a fine thing and we are all then nearer to copy point and classicality. 1 can see how necessary it is to live always in the country-at all seasons of the year." Twachtman's use of the word "isolation" is instructive, since, like Landscape, his other works are generally devoid of figures and quite often lack evidence of human habitation. His paintings richly document seasonal change, with fall and, especially, winter, much more frequently depicted than the spring and summer favored by the French Impressionists.
Twachtman was fond of poetry, and loved especially Heinrich Heine. Music was even more of a passion for him, especially the works of Romantics like Johannes Brahms, Frederick Chopin, and Franz Schubert. Taken as oil protrail and painting from the photo , both music and poetry are terms which could be applied to Twachtman's work, full as it is of the atmosphere, harmony, and "color" that characterize the other two art forms. Landscape sings an autumnal lyric of growth and decay, of seasonal death and renewal.

Oil Painting: How To Paint

from:oilpaintings

This how-to is a simple outline you can follow if you are just starting to create an oil painting. Every artist will surely have his or her own ritual, but in oil painting, some steps naturally come after one another.
Study of the Subject
It is wise to be prepared regarding the subject or theme you shall paint. Scrutinize every detail of the object or scene you wish to paint and form this picture in your mind. It is said that majority of the process of creating an oil painting lies in this stage, but this may not become applicable to abstract paintings. Nevertheless, remember that Jackson Pollock took years to perfect his splatters, no matter how random they seem to be.
Setting Up
Your painting area must be comfortable enough for you to move about, set your supplies, and perform your strokes or experimentations. The room must also have good ventilation. If you're going to work outside, be careful about having your things knocked over by the wind or other external elements.
Unless you don't care about your clothing, wear an apron or frock. The same goes for your work area: lay down paper, plastic, or dropcloth, and make sure they're tacked firmly in place.
You may need (or want) to stretch your canvas beforehand. Also, if your canvas has not been thoroughly primed yet—make sure it is, even if it is labeled so—then be sure to prime it.
Lay out your supplies, such that they are all within reach. Don't be too rash about placing paints on your palette as you may not need all of them at once.
Find out about the most important oil painting materials you'll need in this article.
Painting
Staining the canvas ground more or less marks the "painting proper." Here you get to decide the underlying hue that will affect the overall look of your painting. It also serves as an encouragement when you feel your canvas looks too bare before beginning to sketch. You can choose to skip this step, nevertheless.
Sketching in the underpainting transfers the image in your head onto the canvas and gives you an idea where to do what with your colors. You can sketch on the canvas with another medium, such as acrylic or charcoal, depending on the effect you want to achieve.
The painting stage seems more like a cycle: since oil paint takes a long while to completely dry up—a day or two—and since it is traditionally accomplished in layers (see Oil Painting Techniques), it takes a lot of patience and dedication to complete an oil painting. If you're feeling adventurous (or impatient), you can paint wet-on-wet though! But in both cases, let your painting dry up in a safe place that's free from unwanted scratching and smudging.
Just remember that applying oil paint on a canvas is completely different from pencil-pushing and working on paper. For a reference on different oil painting techniques, such as frottie, scumble, grisaille, glazing, dabbing, masking, or pulling, read more here. These techniques are not just useful for adding variety and a different "look," but are also helpful in making adjustments or corrections to your painting.
Cleanup and Care
While you're in the waiting stage of the "painting cycle," it's essential to keep your painting materials in tip-top shape—not only because they're expensive or hazardous! Tightly cover the palette with plastic wrap; keep it airtight. Let the muck in your thinner settle, then use the clean portion. This is also the best time to thoroughly clean up your brushes, to be ready for another round of painting.
Once you're done with the finishing touches of your painting, such as glazes and varnishes and other protective measures, store your painting once more in a cool, safe place. Avoid rolling up your paintings as this causes them to crack and flake. Framing is a failsafe way to make your paintings more secure and possibly even better-looking.
There! Your painting is done, and it's now ready to hang—in your home or in a gallery!
For more helpful advice, read Oil Painting Tips.

Analyzing "Marble Lady," an oil painting by Paul Jaisini, New York, 1999

by Yustas Kotz-Gottlieb
from:lulu

In his art, Jaisini insists on overcoming the dehumanization, the suppression of sensuality. In every historical period, ideas and problems are expressed that will not come to pass. Jaisini seeks to identify this idea in the present, excavate it from the past, and invent it in a new way for the future.
In our murky, anxious world, in the midst of the soul's confusions and the multiplying moral losses, the artist seeks and always finds some big and small islands of "eternal truths," and asserts the indestructible age-long parables that reveal these truths in the new light, in his own system of sign-images.
Jaisini calls his style, "Gleitzeit," which he defines as "style based on depiction of visual flexibility with theoretical flexibility...to achieve composition of enclosure-- art based on the depiction of a circle evolution of understanding and seeing. A kind of art which draws upon imagery and seeks to reveal and abstract idea of the connection within...with a capacity to change visually by the artistic magic changing your subconscious mind. It is a session of Hypnosis which controls you by a disorganized absolute harmony of everything expected from a 'nonexistent' picture."
I realized that the more you look at "Gleitzeit" works and think, the more you see, feel, and understand, but never completely, as given work always has too many aspects. There is always some kind of "space" in the painting, on which the observer feels free, without a persistent prompting of the artist, to use his own system of perception.
To me, "Marble Lady" seems to be a late modern modification of the Greek myth of the sculptor Pygmalion, who used his illusionist skill to satisfy a private fantasy of the ideal woman. Disappointed by the imperfections of the opposite sex, he created Galatea out of marble and during a festival in honor of Venus, Pygmalion prayed for a woman as perfect as his statue. Venus answered his prayer by bringing his statue to life and eliminated the boundary between reality and illusion.
In Jaisini's "Marble Lady," the object of the intense desire remains alluring, yet perpetually distant. Desire of the others is often imagined in terms of a fetish. The so-called civilized man can be considered in his delight of female form.
The Marble Lady in the painting is observed by two types of spectators: the masculine and the non-masculine male. Therefore, the image of the woman is defined through the desire of both spectators, the "unmanly" poet and the macho "savage." The statue of Galatea was and still is the symbol of fictional perfection, a result of the search for ideal woman that parallels the artist's own creative urge. A post-feminist culture has found out a way to reinvent the woman as she once was: eager to appear physically attractive, the man-made woman. The "Marble Lady" enables male domination by being unreachable and desirable.
The construction of such a female identity fiction can inspire both high and low natures. In all of his works, Jaisini unites the high and low principles, integrating art into the material life, breaking out of art's ivory tower.
"Marble Lady" is a compact, pyramidal composition of the "trio." As in all of his works, Jaisini subdues the figures to the articulation of line and its rhythmic connection between forms in space, a sort of analytical process, based on the swinging line, which starts up ideas, shapes, and colors. These line arabesques are highly individual textures of Jaisini's art.
A decorative role of the painting's color is to create the temperature contrast of the heated environment with the marble-cold statue. In modern and postmodern times, there are increasingly fewer outlets for sensual urges and desires which lay at the origin of human society that imposes restrictions. Sexuality remained beyond the scope of most art history. Interaction between male and female is still responsible for the continued functioning of the universe.