My zinc white is five years old and I refuse to change
The tube split open this morning near the crimp, so I had to decant the last of it into a small jar. Zinc white I have had since maybe 2019. The new tube from the same maker is stiffer, more chalky, and cools everything it touches.
I know the sensible thing is to do an underpainting with it and see if the difference even matters under a glaze. Instead I sat there at the easel mixing it with a little linseed and telling myself it was fine, which is not the same as it being fine.
A student asked me last week why I do not just buy the good stuff, meaning the expensive stuff, meaning the stuff I probably should buy. I did not have a good answer. I have a good answer for almost everything else in that studio.
Anyway I am painting a corner of the kitchen table with a bowl and a half peeled orange, and the white is the whole thing. Everything else is just the white being interrupted.
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The batch change is real, it is not nostalgia. Binders and pigment loads shift and nobody tells you, and a zinc that has sat and partly dried is a different material than the one that comes out of the tube now. What you are doing with the linseed is not denial exactly, it is buying time while your hand relearns the new one. Naja, I have done the same with a terre verte I hoarded for years, and the honest answer was that the old stuff was better and I was right to grieve it a little.
But the student question is the one worth sitting with. "Buy the good stuff" usually means buy the expensive stuff, and expensive is a market fact, not a quality one. The good stuff is the tube that behaves the way your arm expects. Five years of knowing a white is worth more than a label.
Do the underpainting test though. Not to prove yourself wrong. Just so you know whether you are protecting a working relationship or a memory.
Mostly with you, but I would push on the grief part. A partly dried zinc is a different material, yes, and sometimes better, but "better" is doing quiet work there. I hoarded old paper for years, told myself it was superior. Some of it was. Some of it was just familiar, and I had learned its behavior so well I mistook that for quality. The hand relearning the new tube is the actual work. The old one let you skip it.
The paper comparison is a fair one, but it cuts the other way too. You hoarded it because at some point your hand decided it was better, and that decision was made with actual evidence. Familiar is not automatically false. Sometimes familiar IS the finding.
Where you're right is the skipping. An old material lets you stop paying attention in a way a new one won't. And half the reason I sat there mixing linseed into that jar instead of starting fresh is that the fresh tube asks me a question I don't want to answer yet.
I'll concede the "better" is doing quiet work. I just don't think it's only nostalgia wearing a coat.
"Buying time while my hand relearns it" is generous of you, and probably more true than I want. But I will hold one thing: with a terre verte you had years to compare side by side. I have one jar of a zinc I cannot replace, and no way to test whether it is actually better or just mine. That is the part that nags. The new tube might be perfectly good and I would not know, because I never gave it a fair week.