Why Oils? Exploring My Artistic Process and Passion for Oil Painting

Elly Painting in her studio

This is an interesting topic for me to explore as a relatively new and largely self-taught painter. No doubt in a year or two I will have quite a different approach and take on this subject as I evolve as an artist.

I try to capture the inspiration for my work in photographs. I even took several photography classes to improve my skills!  I find working from a photograph, or sometimes multiple photographs, easier to capture the moment.  The more I work from my imagination, the harder it is to create a cohesive painting.  The exception is obviously when I am doing work that is completely abstract or derived from my imagination.  These ideas often come to me at 4:30am when my brain starts racing with creativity.  Some of my abstract landscapes are based on photographs, either deliberately blurred, or from blurring my eyes as I capture the image in the painting.

I vary between painting from images on my iPad or from a printed photograph.  Generally, for larger paintings or more complicated subjects I will print out a colour image on either A4 or A3 paper, so that I can get the dimensions right – creating a grid on both the image and the canvas so that the composition is correct.  However often, especially for commissions, I will work from various reference photographs for different parts of the painting, so I will have all those images on my iPad so I can flip between them as needed.  It might be a picture of a boat that has been requested to be included in a painting, or a photo of the light falling on Whakaari (White Island) at a certain time of day to capture the contours, but I like to get these details right to the best of my ability.

I’ll often, but not always, prime my canvas with an undercoat of acrylic primer, or even underpaint in acrylic sometimes, so that no bare canvas shows through the finished product.  There are many reasons for this and I’m definitely not the expert on this matter, but I love the warmth that glows through the painting when primed in a warm colour.  This is especially important when I’m trying to capture light.

Next, I often draw a rough outline of the subject with a watercolour pencil to make sure I'm accurate when I start to lay down paint.  Sometimes I’ll tape off a section of the painting, like the horizon line, so that I can paint the sky in first, which gives me cleaner lines and enables me to continue in the same day without having to wait for the paint to dry.

Oils on a palette

Waiting for paint to dry is a downside of working with oil paints.  So, why do I prefer oils?  For the first 8 or 9 months that I was painting, I painted with acrylic paint, because this is what I knew (from school many years ago), and they were easy and accessible.  I thought these were great, but I always had an urge to work with oils, and a fascination about the effects possible with that medium.  So, I took a couple of classes with a very talented local artist who is extremely generous in sharing his knowledge and teaching others.  I learnt all the differences between working in oils and in acrylics, and how the process differs and what I needed to set myself up to work in oils.  I have never looked back. 

The ability to blend and work the paint for longer really makes a huge difference for me, and I really feel as though oils are my medium, at least for now.  The paintings I am creating now in oils, I feel far surpass anything I did in acrylics.  Now maybe that is partly about my evolution as an artist, but I put a large part of it down to the medium.  Oils provide me more time and space to create without feeling that I’m on a timeline.  Blending and smoothing the paint is easier and I feel I can do so many layers of translucent paint to achieve different effects. I also love that oil paints are true to colour, unlike acrylics that generally dry darker.  This means I can leave a painting and come back when it is dry and mix the right colours to continue with it.  One of the huge bonuses is that I can take a break or be interrupted and the paint on my brush and palette won’t dry while I’m taking a phone call! 

I think I can safely say I am a convert with no plans to return to acrylics!