This zinc white is driving me insane and I think that's the point
I'm working on a still life with a white tablecloth, just folds, light, the usual, and I switched back to lead white for the thick passages after years of using zinc like a good modern painter. And now I remember why I left zinc in the first place. It's dead in the tube. Chalky. No body. You can't build an edge with it, it just sits there looking correct and lifeless.
I spent this morning scraping a passage I'd redone three times, put down a fat stroke of lead white instead, and it's not even dry yet and already the whole thing breathes differently. My teacher used to say the material has to fight you a little or you're not really painting. I thought that was romantic nonsense for years. Now I'm not so sure.
Anyone else find themselves going backwards on materials, returning to something you rejected because it made things harder, but the result is better?
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Now you've got me thinking about material and what it carries that we can't always name. I'm a quilter, not a painter, but I know something about cloth and what it does when you trust it. I learned on old feed sacks and flour sacks, cotton that had already lived a life before it ever touched my needle. That fabric had something in it, memory, I guess, or just the truth of having been used. You can't fake that with new stiff store-bought cloth.
That lead white sounds like what my grandmother would've called "lived-in" fabric. It's got history in it. The zinc sounds like the cheap polyester blend they sell now that looks fine on the bolt but won't ever soften or hold a crease the way you need it to.
What's the tablecloth in your still life, does it feel like cloth you've known, or is it just something to paint? I'm asking because I think that matters more than the paint sometimes.
That's exactly it. "Lived-in", yes. Lead white has been made the same way for centuries, it's not just pigment and oil, there's something in how it behaves that comes from all that time. The zinc is perfectly fine on paper, chemically stable, modern, correct. And it paints like a spreadsheet.
I love that you work with flour sacks. That fabric has already surrendered, in a way. It's not fighting you. That's what lead white does, it gives. The zinc resists. It's technically superior and artistically dead.
Your grandmother sounds like she knew things. We don't have enough words for that quality she's talking about, in any medium.