Water is the one material I refuse to economize on
I was reorganizing my supplies this week and counted eleven jars of water sitting around the studio in various states of use. Eleven. My husband walked in, looked at the collection, and asked if I was conducting an experiment. I told him I was, and had been for thirty years.
People economize on paint, on paper, on brushes, and I understand all of it. But water is the variable I will not cut corners on. A tired wash full of lifted pigment is the difference between a leaf that looks alive and one that looks painted. When I teach, I make students change their water after every third wash and they always think I'm being precious. Then they see the two paintings side by side and they stop arguing.
Distilled water for mixing, tap for cleaning, and never the two shall meet. I know it sounds like superstition. Maybe it is, at this point. But there's a particular blue-gray that only appears in water that's been sitting overnight, and I've learned to recognize it the way you'd recognize a bad mood in a friend. Some days I paint with it anyway, just to see what happens.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
This made me think of my own work in a different way. In Mithila painting we do not use water the way you describe, but we do use it for the colours, for mixing the natural pigments, and I have learned the same lesson in my own fashion. One batch of indigo mixed with dirty water, and the whole fish or peacock looks dull, like the life has gone out of it. The elders in my family always insisted on fresh water for every colour, every time, even when it meant more trips to the well when I was a boy and the days were hot. I thought it was fussiness then. Now I understand it was respect for the material.
Your students are fortunate that you teach them this early. Some lessons take thirty years to learn properly, as you say. Eleven jars is not an experiment, it is a lifetime of knowing what matters.🙏
This is such a beautiful point, especially the "respect for the material" part. I paint in acrylic so I'm usually fighting to keep my water too clean instead of too dirty, but I think I know exactly what you mean. There's this moment when the water gets that milky tint and you tell yourself it's fine, and then the painting comes out flat and you know why.
I actually had a teacher once tell me to think of clean water as part of the palette, not just a utility. I rolled my eyes at the time but she was right. It's funny how the things that seem like fussiness when you're young turn out to be the whole lesson.
Do you still paint in the Mithila style now, or have you branched out? I find that kind of traditional work so fascinating. The natural pigments sound like a whole different world than what I'm used to from a tube.
Your teacher was absolutely right, and I wish I had heard that phrase years ago instead of arriving at it by trial and error. Clean water is as much a part of the palette as any pigment on the palette itself. It is the vehicle that decides whether the colour stays luminous or goes muddy, and that is not a small thing.
I have never painted in acrylic, but I imagine the relationship is reversed in an interesting way. You are stopping the water from doing its job rather than letting it do too much. Still, the flatness you describe comes from the same place. The medium is telling you something and you have decided not to listen.
I am glad someone else remembers being young and rolling their eyes at precisely the instruction that later turned out to be the whole game.
That is a lovely way to put it, and it resonates more than you might expect. However differently we handle the medium, the principle underneath is the same: the water is carrying something, and if it is carrying the wrong thing, the colour cannot be honest with you.
I have never seen Mithila painting done properly, only photographs, but what you describe of the discipline around it, the elders insisting on fresh water even in the heat, that sounds very familiar to me. My own teacher was the same way. She would not let us near a subject until we had mastered the handling of clean washes, and I thought her exacting to the point of tyranny. I have spent the decades since proving her right.
Do you still follow the old practice, or have you made your peace with the modern convenience of running water?