ART TIP OF THE WEEK

PAINTING THE EDUCATION PICTURE

One of the major problems with our painting education in the last 40 years has been that most, if not all, of the old skill, knowledge, and truths have been ignored or are not even known to most of the ones who profess (get it?) to be able to teach us.

This is not all the fault of the teachers, who I am sure do their best and think that they have learned all there is to know about painting from their learned professors…Unfortunately, most of what they know is wrong or at least not complete.

In the fifties and sixties the trend was toward abstract, expressionist, mod, pop, et al. Suddenly it was ok to use house paint, gum turpentine, and an odd assortment of techniques that have proven to be less than permanent.

One of my old friends was the printmaking instructor at a major university. She used to tell all her students that she had been doing it this way for thirty years and saw no problems with it. "It" being, washing the etching plates in kerosene with no gloves, dipping your hands in the acids, breathing the mordents, heating asphalt on the hot plate and breathing that, using rosins with no mask, well, you get the idea…

This was shortly before she died of liver cancer, but I'm sure it had nothing to with any of the studio practices she was taught and passed on to her students, many of whom are now your teachers.

In the next few weeks I will attempt to list some of the wrongs and some rights to replace them. Theses methods and ideas, for the most part, are not subjective. They are proven truths that have been ignored by the people who teach us because they never learned them and their egos refuse to let them admit they do not have the right answers.

I will talk about paints, oils, printing, basic studio safety (boring), techniques for painting in many different mediums, and I will rate paints on a purely love/hate, completely subjective, bias, unfair, and in most cases lawsuit educing basis.