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Oil Paints - The Spirit of the Medium

© Susan A. Wenz-Denise

When I wake up in the morning and stroll into my living room after a night of drinking red wine, listening to my favorite music, and painting, I just love the feeling of being hit with the glorious smell of the previous night's creativity. Mmmmm, the smell of oil paints and spirits! It gets the imagination in my blood flowing again, turns my attention to the still wet product of my last night's passion and a sense of pride and admiration wells up inside of me. Next, I find myself quickly heading over to the stack of brushes on my working space, and already lathering up a mixture of oil colour on my palette in order to continue what I didn't finish last night. I find myself grateful that the canvas is still moist and ready for my brush's touch, because the alizarin red hue in the upper right hand corner of the painting might not be quite red enough! Unlike other painting mediums, oil colour is the only paint you can manipulate like that.

If you haven't had the opportunity to experience the passion that envelops from the beautifully sticky stink of grease paint, you don't know what you're missing. Don't get me wrong; there is a place in my artwork for different painting media other than oil paint, like watercolors, acrylic paints and gouache. But, if you're like me in that you delight in the morning hangover of Winsor & Newton oil colour, linseed oil, and spirits of turpentine, or think you would if you had the opportunity - read on!

I started painting when my father gave me his old paint chest. I was 14 years old and already excelling in art classes, but never tried painting yet, especially in oils. It seemed so intimidating to me because it was the medium of the old masters, so I put the chest aside for a while. I decided to try acrylic painting in school on a canvas board first. I was surprised at how well I took to mixing colors and applying them to the canvas. As a class, we were instructed to paint an enlarged portion of a flower (ala Georgia O'Keefe) and my painting was coming out darn good. The art teachers already started labeling me a "natural". Nonetheless, I was rather frustrated because I felt rushed. The art period in my junior high school was a mere 50 minutes long, and I was having a hard time picking up where I left off the without feeling fragmented and disconnected with the work, because the paint was bone dry from the day before and seemed too PERMANENT. Mistakes, which were unavoidable, became hard to cover up without redoing a whole section, and of course redoing a whole section meant trying to blend with the rest of the painting. Anyone who paints using acrylic knows how poorly the paint blends, especially once it starts to get tacky, because it is meant to dry very fast. I got through it, but knew acrylic painting wasn't for me.

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