Oil Paintings D a n i e l .. O B How they are made? All my paintings are done in technique established 500 years ago, technique tested by history and practiced by the best known artist as: Rubens, Rembrandt, ... It is known to us as Flemish Technique. It is very slow and complicated process and so no more taught in schools nowadays any more. The Canvas (Linen) is stretched on wooden frame (called stretcher) and the surface is isolated from environment by Rabbit Skin Glue (called sizing). The next is priming the Linen with Lead Oil, which is ground for paints. The back of the Linen is also isolated from environment with cotton strips. On the ground is laid the very detailed drawing and covered with the first layer of oil paint, Imprimatura. When the Imprimatura is dried, the next layer, Umber Layer, is applied. This layer consist of two sublayers, the first and the second shadow. The next layer is Dead Layer. In this layer I paint whole scene with the smallest details. When it is done I have Black & White Paint. Colors are added in the next two layers. The last layer is texture where I add the finest details. After 6-12 months, when painting is completely dry, I varnish it with Damar Varnish. I think, it is important to emphase also that I use Copal and Amber as ingredients (other ingredients being: cold pressed Linseed Oil, Stand Oil, Canada Balsam or Venice Turpentine, and Rectified Turpentine) in my painting medium. It makes, among other numerous benefits, all colors brilliant (colors with high Value and Chroma) and since Copal or Amber once dry is no more re soluble, there will be no problem in restoration process. Also all of paints I use are made by Old Holland and Michael Harding, and just some I make myself from Old Holland pigments (in cold pressed Linseed Oil) which ensure the highest quality of applied paints, excellent lightfasness and permanence. The painting will last as beautiful very very long time, hundreds of years. --------------------------- Some days ago (2008 year) I am asked "are you as a photographer happy"? Here is my answer. Many (former) photographers had to quit photography and to switch to “new and improved” way to produce picture in the quick way. It was surviving requirement of the moment. However that new medium is cold, not touchable, medium without passion, you just feel so empty doing it again and again. Job without hope and without possibility to touch the beauty with you hands. That sort of former “switched” photographers are huge part of unhappy. The happy part do the same job but they are born under computer keyboard, so digital picture making is all they know. Actually (my opinion) they have no idea what happiness is. On another hand, to photographers today is left art photography as only choice, just simple because it is the only possibility for photography today and in future. Like oil painting. No one make oil painting to show news, nor it ever was its purpose. I too was pressed to quit what I learned and did all my life in past, B&W photography, but I found different way to make my living. I decided to add something on my squeezed photography. I looked at my hands and told to them -now is the time to show what you know-, and decided to restore my old knowledge about oil paintings. Actually that two things are I am trained for on Academy, so nothing unknown. To them I added one natural extension business, framing my own work. So now, with B&W photography, Oil Painting, and Framing I can say that my photography life is even far more exciting and nicer than in past. Doing all of that three things how one can be unhappy? I thanks to The God for all that blesings He gave to me Oil on Linen -- 40 x 45 in Oil on Linen -- 40 x 48 in Red Rose -- 24 x 36 in this canvas size I took from my photo cameras Leica-R8 and Nikon-F6 On the Easel (work in progres) You can see here progres of my Rose study before aproach the final painting --------------------------- The difference between Photography and Painting: The reason to take a photograph over a painting is not decided by what the picture looks like only. If (and it may be a big if) one want a picture that encapsulates the unique relationship between a photograph and its subject then nothing else will do. A photograph that is generated by the arrival into a sensitive surface of a physical sample of subject matter. Yes, something that was part of the subject travels across space at about 300 000 km/sec, gets spatially organised by a lens or a pinhole (or something else) and causes an arrangement of marks to form in the sensitive surface that it enters. That arrangement of marks is a picture of the subject; a photograph. Everything else, drawings, paintings, inkjets, etchings, whatever, are fabricated according to a description, not a physical sample, of the subject. The relationship between a subject and the photograph happens nowhere else in art. All the energy for a photograph comes from the subject. The only place the energy comes from to generate a photograph is the subject. Remember, photography was invented in, and works perfectly in, a world without electric power. There are many picture making methods which can make things that look remarkably like photographs. Photo-realist paintings, mezzotints, inkjet prints, and photo-lithographs are examples. But "looks like" doesn't mean "same as". The fundamental difference remains, pictures made from samples versus pictures made from descriptions, and that difference is central and decisive. Photographer recognize the moment when the subject before them coresponds to the mental image they have formed of it, whereas painters comunicate their understanding through techniques that represent their cumulative response over time. I can also say Photography is a single stroke art, painting is mulistroke (thousands of them) art. And many other arts are in between. Why Color: When I want color I reach not for my photo cameras but for my brushes, oil paints, mediums, and linen. Colors are just not given to Photography and using photo camera no one ever can make presentable what he knows, but rather what turns out in random try to reproduce mental image, then he adjust himself to what is presented even some colors are always, more or less, off the intention. Photography does not suffer because of lack of colors. It is because scenes that are the best in color are just not for photography, and scenes good for photography are just not as good in color. Having both is a great gift from God. These days color is no more the luxury as it was in past centuries. Colors surround us just anywhere we are, and its over-saturation is a reason of losing some of its magic. I believe that using color in painting helps me to recapture the beauty of color and to experience once again the almost hypnotic fascination it once had. Human beings have made colored objects since the earliest times, but never in such great quantities as now. In past centuries, colored objects were most often owned by only a few wealthy or powerful people. For ordinary people, color was not available, except as found in the natural world and as seen in churches and cathedrals. Cottages and their furnishings were made of natural materials -- mud, wood, and stone. Homespun cloth usually retained the neutral colors of the original fibers or, if dyed with vegetable dyes, was no stable and faded. For most people, even with just some of colors, a bit of bright ribbon, a beaded hatband, or a brightly embroidered belt was a treasure to guard and cherish. Everywhere we turn, we encounter human-made color: television and movies in color, buildings painted brilliant colors inside and out, flashing colored lights, highway billboards, magazines and books in full color, even newspapers with full-page color displays. Intensely colored fabrics that would have been valued like jewels and reserved for royalty in times past are now available to nearly everyone, wealthy or not. Thus, we have largely lost our former sense of the wondrous color. But what are all colors for? In the natural world of animals, birds, and plants, color always has a purpose -- to attract, repel, conceal, communicate, warn, or assure survival. For humans in the present-day color even begun to lose its purpose and meaning for most of people. Or is purpose and meaning still subliminally inherent in color as a remainder of our biological heritage? Is the pencil I write with painted yellow for a purpose? Many questions about colors are still secret and to scientist. Is red as we see really red? Is the pencil really yellow? We cannot know, because we cannot get outside of our own eye/brain/mind system to find out. What we do know is that when the sun goes down, color disappears. Color and Photography: Colors In photography are already made, they are there, in nature or from artificial lighting. In general, photographer do not make colors, he have to copy colors and to reproduce them through the already more or less standardized process with so many steps. Also photographer never have complete control on color reproduction within each step, e.g. color reproduction depend on film emulsion, lens coating, lens filter available, exposure, film developer, film developing procedure, photo paper, filters in enlarger, …Then comes problem with elimination of some extra colors and touching up with other color in the scene, color harmony sake. All photographer can do is to know his material and techique, but and in the best case it is far from control of colors. It all comes to be: make it and accept as -it is exactly what I wanted. No other choice. Colors are very delicate and sensitive to each other and just not given to photography.