You should really have a lot of fun this week because we'll be exploring
some really wonderful viscous and fluid paints here,
the whole range of painter's materials.
We're exploring the work of Willem de Kooning this week,
certainly one of the masters of the New York avant garde.
Willem de Kooning, an artist who works in a very wide variety of styles,
working with a very wide variety of materials and techniques as well.
I'm not Willem de Kooning, clearly.
I am an art history professor as well as a conservator I've taught de Kooning a lot,
I've spent a lot of time studying him.
I've also treated his paintings as a conservator.
So, this is coming from a place very close to de Kooning.
But, surely, this is not the way to make a de Kooning painting.
It's basically a compilation of many different ways that De Kooning worked.
And we're just going to summarize them here today.
And you can see in front of me a lot of paint,
a lot of oil paints straight out of the tube.
We have a lot of linseed oil here.
We have some Dammar varnish here.
And you'll see, I'm not, well I do have
one typical baker's pan here which I'll be using as a palette for one color.
But really, we're in the realm of kitchens now.
And if you have some old bowls,
or old cans, or what have you,
this is really the quantities of paint that we're going to be working with,
if you're going to be working with a large format painting.
De Kooning painted with his whole body.
He was a gestural painter,
he was an action painter.
And really, using really large quantities of liquid paints here,
allows the body to trace these huge marks,
powerful strokes across the canvas.
So, let's get started.
What I'm going to do essentially is to build my entire palette
first before even approaching the easel.
That way, I know what I'm working with.
Let's start off with a cobalt blue.
Vast majority of the paints I'm working with are going to
be really low viscosity allowing them to be
quite fluid and really translate the power of my gestures on the canvas.
In other words, I'm not going to paint with this really thick toothpaste thick quality
of artist's oil grade paint right out of the tube.
I'm going to douse it with some nice oil there,
and I'm really going to cut that viscosity,
make it a lot more flowable on the surface of the painting.
And there is something really gorgeous,
really wonderful about this gooey quality of
oil paints which you just can't get in the rather plastic realm of acrylics.
So, here, kind of a medium speed paint if you will.
It's not super thick but it's not super fluid,
its not running off of my brush.
And I'm going to vary my consistency of different paints here,
some of them medium like this,
some of them, as you'll see,
will be a lot more fluid than this.
So I'm just going to save that for later.
Now, let's work on another one.
Let's work with some kind of a flesh tone.
Now for a kind of basic Caucasian flesh tone,
it's nice to use some buff titanium.
This is actually the same thing as titanium white.
It's just not bleached.
OK. So both of these buff titanium and titanium white,
this one gets bleached, titanium white.
Buff titanium has more of a neutral tone to it.
And, then to get a decent kind of Caucasian flesh tone,
believe it or not, you add a little bit of red for warmth,
you add a little bit of yellow for warmth,
and then you add a little bit of green for depth.
And, again, let's add a little bit of varnish into there and make it nice and glossy.
This is Dammar varnish,
it's a natural resin, it comes from trees.
Dammar is D, A, M, M, A,
R. Lets add a little bit of linseed oil in there as well.
And, then, let's add a little bit of mineral spirits or turpentine.
And, let's choose a nice brush for flesh above
this one and start getting some of these colors mixing here.
Now, that mixture of solvents and media that I added here,
remember that's Dammar varnish,
linseed oil the typical vehicle or binder of oil painting medium,
and some solvent, some mineral spirits,
that's to do a couple of things.
First of all, it's to make it a lot thinner on the brush, a lot faster.
And here I am getting sloppy.
This is just the beginning. You'll see.
It's to make, the viscosity lower,
to cut that viscosity.
Another role of that combination,
is to make it glossy and shiny.
And these wonderful fluid paints that de Kooning work
with are often extremely glossy in character.
OK, so here is the second color of my palette here.
Kind of a murky,
mean-looking skin tone here. I like this.
This is going to look really nice when contrasting with some really hot colors,
some nice warm red colors.
So, let's make one of them. I'm going to be working with cadmium red hue here.
Anytime you see that word hue that means,
well, you cheaped out a little bit.
Cadmium is a heavy metal, it's expensive.
Cadmium red hue is an organic,
read, cheap substitute for it.
Now, it's OK because the hue of that color,
is going to be exactly the same as cadmium.
In other words, gorgeous, you know.
Stop sign red or Coca-Cola red.
We're going to add a little bit of linseed oil and,
then, we're going to add some water.
You're thinking, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.
Water and linseed oil what is this guy doing?
Well, de Kooning liked to violate these rules because he
liked to have really interesting paint textures,
sometimes frothing up on the surface.
Now, because of mixed water and oil,
you see this texture it's an unhappy texture.
It's really not a solution as much as it is a suspension.
In other words, it's just a physical mixture of these things that don't like each other,
they don't play nicely together.
But this weird alligator skin kind of texture here is
going to be really active and really interesting on our surface.
Let's make some nice,
hot light-yellow color.
Since, we already have a little bit of white going, let's add to it.
