SANDY GARNETT ART BLOG

People often ask me what materials and mediums I use. I ought to be endorsed for this article. I think I will pursue this track.

I paint in oils and acrylics. I picked up acrylic painting reluctantly in order to hand paint two Chevrolet cars on the HORDE Tour in 1997. My gig was to paint the cars on the side of the stage while the bands played. After each show the cars would be ramped into an eighteen wheeler like everything else and we would all caravan to the next venue and repeat the cycle as tours go. Anyway oil painting was out of the question, an absolute nightmare to even contemplate, so I turned to acrylic paint. I had to paint one of the cars in Detroit before the tour. I arrived at this warehouse which housed 100 one of a kind automobiles. This was a remarkable and intimidating sight. The shop guys looked at me like they wanted to pound me. Why was I chosen to fly in from New York for this gig? I had five days to paint the car. My first acrylic job was also my first airbrush job. I had never been paid for either. This was seat of the pants flying, scary as hell, thrilling, and I pulled it off. The car was painted and I hoped the clear coat would work on top of the acrylic. I had talked to a guy who did motorcycle tanks and he thought I’d be okay. Thankfully the acrylic set nicely under the clear coat and I survived the job. This car was on display next to the car I would paint every day on the tour.

After this first acrylic experience I slowly took to acrylic for certain projects. My older Reconstruction series paintings were all oils, but now more than half of them might be in acrylic. My Fingerprint Project portrait paintings are often acrylic paintings as well these days.

There is a romance and quality to the age oil painting, a vibration in oil which keeps it in its own league really. I liken oil painting to a stubborn old lady with great wisdom, like the sea, a tricky medium that is a lifetime affair. One never really masters oil painting so much as learns to ride her winds. You get to know the ways of oil, you learn the tides, and for some artists you navigate your ship through most any waters and reach your destination, eventually. Oil painting requires a lot of time and patience, layers of focus, concentration, sittings. Most young oil painters find mud quickly as I did. I liken acrylic painting to a spritely, zippy deer; nervous nelly, fickle, fast as darts, slick and edgy with a dose of crash and burn that make the medium barnburning when properly utilized. I find that I manhandle acrylic paint, push it around, tell it who is boss, whereas with oil paints I walk with a little more caution UNLESS I don’t care how long a piece takes to dry. When one makes one’s living selling off the easel dry time is a crucial aspect of one’s studio flow, cash management, pipeline, everything. My easel is where I generate my dollars so I can’t generally sit around for months waiting for the paint to dry. For this reason I paint my oils in a certain way that I would recommend everybody at least try once.

I stick to oil paint for all traditional portraiture, my figure paintings and anything that trends surrealistic in my world. Oil painted space has a deep history, remarkable respect from even the least informed laymen, and insinuates expensive quality frankly. Although it is very manageable to paint acrylics like oils as I’ve done, acrylics are fussy and one must be very experienced with the percentage of water in each brushstroke, as colors change rapidly when the paint dries ten seconds later. Oils on the other hand remain open for hours days, which is well suited to miniscule nuance necessary in painting hyperrealism or most representational work of any sort.

The nuance in oil painting is something. One can speak in parts to the hundred, and when the form of a structure is correct often times it is the nuance of color or tone which keeps a portrait for example from locking into place and ringing brightly in line with a fluent portraitist’s vision. In painting realistically an artist goes back and forth, back and forth, marking the slightest variations in an effort to spin the proper angles and dimensions out of a canvas, to make the subject right, to make the canvas sing. This element of painting is not available in the same measure with acrylic painting.

Regarding materials, I use an Avanti easel on which I’ve painted over 750 paintings. I love this easel and I have two. It’s the strongest, most stable, most compact, logical easel I’ve ever found. Although its metal made and I’m a sucker for wood, the design is pretty and the easel just says ‘Paint on me right not damnit’. I like my palette right in front of me as opposed to on the side, so I had my metal master friend Sam Boccuzzi create a steel palette holder that slides into the slots on the Avanti easel. Right under the area where the painting sits on the easel is a tray which I use to place folded paper towels that I dab my brush on when getting the right fluidity. For a decade I used to roll up old tee shirts, but shirts get crusty when they sit there forever, and for some reason I am less inclined to toss a rag than a paper towel. Paper towels get gnarled quickly and so I replace with fresh paper towels, which gives me a sensation of a ‘clean palet’ when I’m looking for my next move on a painting. The clean palette is another crucial studio element. When I started painting I used a wooden palette, the worst idea ever. One must use a glass palet with a razor blade. Get quarter inch at the glass store, have them sand the edges, and get one of those razor blade holders they use to remove stickers off the windshield at auto emmissions. I use Silicoil Brush Tanks for both my oils and my acrylics. These are little jars with a springy wire coil inside. I have three jars for my acrylics, which have water in them, and three jars for my oils, which have Gamblin Gamsol brush cleaner in them. One jar is earth tone mud color, one is cools like blues and one is generally squeaky clean. These are an absolute must as they make brush control so much smarter and efficient.

I prefer painting on acrylic primed linen, although I paint on acrylic primed canvas all the time as well. Oil painters are snobs and trend towards the traditional rabbit skin glue sizing followed by a lead coat base. Acrylic priming is easier and arguably a bit more archival according to technicians I’ve spoken with, so I have stayed on this track. If I have to go with a prestretched canvas I only go with a thin stretcher if the painting will be framed, otherwise the stretcher will inevitably warp. If I have to buy prestretched for a piece of gallery wrapped contemporary art, I will go with the Fredrix Heavy Duty prestretched canvases. If the canvas is large enough I will put in my own center bars, which Fredrix inexplicably does not do. Because of the unreliability of prestretched canvases in the past five years I have migrated to stretcher companies in Brooklyn. I used to use Lebron, but James died last year (I miss you James) so now I work with Simon Liu. Their facility is excellent, their product is superior and they are very friendly and professional. I also like their boards, which are preprimed, heavy duty and nice to paint on.

I paint with Princeton acrylic brushes, which is unusual for an oil painter. These synthetic hair brushes burn out faster than horse hair or real hair brushes which are more commonly used with oil paint, but the tips on the long handle Princeton brushes are beautiful. It is imperative to clean one’s brushes with soap and water at the end of each session, particularly one’s detail brushes. If one is slinging big manly paint, having five trashed brushes sitting in a coffee can of turpentine is fine, but these brushes won’t get you detail. I’ve got both. The slinging paint brushes are as described, and I treat my Princeton brush tips like they are flower petals. Tools give back if one treats them properly. Generally speaking detail is all about the tip of the brush, and tips burn out quickly when not treated gingerly.

My painting is about my line and wrist and the slide of the brush. The slide is everything to me, and Princeton brushes bring the best out of my slide, so to speak. A lot of painters scumble, forage around with their paint like they are looking for a gold coin in pachysandra. My painting style is more about line, and my passages when scumbling are quick last moment riffs like the period at the end of a sentence, so I’m always thinking about the paint traveling over the weave of the canvas or linen with no drag and with clean lines, like a boat moving through the water. There are a lot of things to trip up this process, the magic of brush on canvas, and so I try to minimize these factors. If a surface feels like sandpaper, as a lot of preprimed canvas does, I’ll get a base coat on the canvas before painting. If I’m painting acrylic I’ll throw a coat of Golden GAC 100 on the canvas. This coat makes for smooth painting and a very nice brush slide. With oils I often block a picture in with Liquitex colored gesso. Liquitex used to make all primary colors  in gesso but they cut the line down unfortunately, so there is black, gray and burnt umber and they suggest that one can tint with other acrylic products. After some research one summer six or seven years ago I determined that painting oil on top of a generous coat of acrylic is not recommended, so I switched to colored gesso. Gesso of course is water based less plastic designed to support oil painting. I got my colored gesso system down to the point where I could paint 70% of my picture this way before going to oil. I pulled back from this method namely as I missed the romance of spending more time with my oil painting. If I do not block a picture out with colored gesso I will put a couple coats of Winsor and Newton underpainting white down on a canvas before starting. I can tint the underpainting white with even upwards of half burnt umber and the coat dries very fast as there is very little linseed oil on the paint. I use this white often in painting when I’m on a tight deadline. I sell it hard to some of my painter friends but they usually find this paint frustrating because oil is supposed to stay open for a long time and this stuff gets a skin on it in an hour or two. So if one uses this medium one must use small dollups, scrape off, and repeat.

In terms of acrylic paints I use Liquitex medium viscosity paints except for my black. For my black I use Golden fluid bone black. The coverage with these paints is amazing and the consistency of the paint fits my style perfectly. The color range is broad, the plastic bottles and squeeze tops are excellent designs, storage of these paints is very logical as it is easy to locate a color from a drawer. These paints don’t pretend to be oil paints like a lot of other acrylics that come in tubes, for example. Tubed acrylic paints are not logical to me. Most acrylic paints have trouble getting their coverage down. Liquidity is everything in acrylic paint. It is most efficient to squeeze out a color, mix if necessary, and apply paint without adding some percentage of water. Liquitex allows me to do all this. Unfortunately as with everything else it took me years to find the stuff. It was always right there but I wish someone had told me years ago. This explains this first article on my blog, which I am enjoying tremendously now.

In terms of oil paints, I like the creamy nature and palette range of Old Holland, although this paint is not for the faint of heart financially. In terms of large coverage or big texture any paint will do, although I like Amsterdam tubes for earthtones. These are large tubes and very reasonably priced, very good for monochrome or earthtone work where color stability is never going to matter anyway. For delicacy of color on the top layers of a painting I stay with the Old Holland or something like it.

Artists talk about mediums all the time. I find mediums an impediment, so I don’t really use any. There are ‘mediums’ in oil paint as it is, so I use Gamblin Gamsol to thin my paint and clean my brushes. Gamsol is a great fluid although very expensive. Gamblin takes great pride in their products, and I have spoken with their techies at length. Gamblin argues that Gamsol evaporates slower, it’s odorless, it has a nice lubricated quality that enhances the slide of my brush slightly, and most importantly Gamblin states that its product meshes or evaporates out of the layers of paint more readily than industrial turpentines.

As I paint 50 pictures a year on average I paint fast to get ideas out quickly and because I have to sell to live. I have developed an oil painting system that allows me to build paintings quickly. I generally paint flat, without texture, and I don’t use mediums that extend drying times. My typical brushstroke might contain 50-70% paint and 30- 50% Gamsol. I tend to layer pictures with numerous quick sittings of light paint, so a painting might be composed of twenty half hour or hour sittings. I do this so my paint can set and I don’t overcommit in oil. It is always better to come close to the edge, because once you fall over you crash and burn.  In this fashion, using light layers of paint which dry quickly, I can get back to the painting before it gets stale and I am always in command of my surface.  Most artists get whopped by oils and move to acrylics immediately.  Acrylics are plain and simple easier to deal with on a multitude of fronts.

I used to use Liquin with my oils, a buttery medium that paint likes which gives off a bit a semi-gloss finish, but colors painted with Liquin can change in storage, which I found alarming. Liquin apparently worked this out but I went off it years ago and haven’t looked back. I have used Galkyd Light, another Gamblin product, but I don’t really need it. If a painting is old and I want wake it up, I’ll spray it with Krylon Kamar, a very nice retouch varnish type product. I used Blair Matt varnish for several hundred paintings but Kamar sprays more evenly, the aerosol tip does not clog like Blair, and I like Krylon’s satin to gloss finish better. In terms of finishes for acrylics any varnish is fine, although I don’t really like the acrylic varnishes I’ve tried as they trend milky and fussy. I think I use a Liquitex satin sometimes, and sometimes I don’t varnish the acrylic paintings.

The biggest problem with mediums is their inconsistency over a painting’s surface, which can really run the eye ragged. When half of your canvas is flat and the other half has a glossy sheen on it you can’t see properly. This is why I paint flat. When the painting is dry it is a consistent matt finish. I can see the whole surface of the picture at equal depth in order to build it. I don’t have to make these visual mathematical equations in my brain to ‘imagine’ what that glossy glare would look like if it weren’t glossy and annoying my eye. Another thing I like about flat painting is that it’s the real deal. If one can paint deep space flatly, the icing on the cake with a quick varnish will knock the painting up a couple decibels, make the painting vibrate 20 to 30% more.

A last tool in the box is a four or five foot long, half inch wooden dowel. This is used to steady one’s hand when painting detail and every representational painter needs this.

The tools of a painter’s trade are important elements to maximizing focus and fluency on the easel. I wish I’d read this article when I started painting. It would have saved me years so I hope it is useful to fellow painters out there.