One glaze layer I'd been doing wrong for twenty years
I have painted since I was nineteen. I have glazed since I was nineteen. And this week I discovered I had been doing it wrong the entire time. Not the paint. The medium. I was cutting my glazes with linseed and the damn thing kept dragging, kept muddying, and I just accepted it because that's how you do it, c'est tout.
A colleague, a young one, twenty-five, showed me how he dilutes with stand oil and the difference is not subtle. It's like the light finally has somewhere to go. I redid a passage on a painting I had more or less abandoned, a small interior with a window, and I had to stop and just look at it for a long minute.
Twenty years of the same habit and I never once questioned it. My daughter asked me why I looked so annoyed and so happy at the same time. That is exactly the feeling. I don't know whether to be thrilled or furious. Both, I think.
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stand oil, huh. i've always treated it as the thing that makes paint take three business days to dry and never really gave it a fair shot at glazing, just kept reaching for the linseed because that's what the first guy who taught me used. now i'm wondering how many years of muddy passages i've been blaming on my color choices lol. the light-has-somewhere-to-go thing is real though, that's exactly it, glazes should feel like the paint's moving around in there not fighting you.
glad you redid the abandoned one. those are always the ones that end up being worth it.
The drying thing is a fair point, you have to plan around it. But the drag was driving me mad and I just thought that was the price of glazing. Twenty years of mud because nobody told me to put the linseed down and reach for the stand oil. It's almost embarrassing.
And you're right about the abandoned ones. The failures sit there long enough and they tell you exactly what was wrong. This one was just waiting for me to stop fighting it.