A Play for the Heart
New paintings in oil of homeless men—street people—uploaded, after almost a year of studies limited to dry media on paper, and in acrylic paint on acetate. This subject and oil painting were made for each other. Poster paint, which is what acrylic paint is made for, does not lend itself well to expressionistic painting; unlike oil paints, which enable a virtually infinite range of gradations of blended color, hues, and tonal values, acrylic paint (as all water-based paint). Acrylic dries almost instantly, giving a distinct brush stroke, less effective than oils in making atmosphere palpable, depth being the difference between the flatness of poster art and easel painting. It makes for good camera-ready art, that is, art for print. Oil paint is notoriously unsuited for photo-reproduction, its inherent glossiness (for one thing) makes glare-free photography frustrating for the cameraman. Poster art is printed, therefore a process, unlike easel painting, which is as individual as the painter, and organic, not a system, not mechanical.
I would go so far as deny oil painting is a technique, exactly. It's too difficult to control. Expect the unexpected, when painting in oil. It's a wild thing, wrong to try to tame it, cause for misunderstanding. That's its attraction for artists. No matter how carefully thought-out, the result is usually completely different. The unexpected factor in oil painting had much to do with the aesthetics of Modernism in art. Previously, if an artist could not achieve the desired result, he quit painting. Today, failure is originality. Now, if you can't paint—you win. And a difficult ethos is contemporary art.
The first few oil paintings were tried first in an iconic style (figure-on-monochromatic ground), but the concept's weakness was obvious. It doesn't take advantage of oil's inherent expressive richness. The intrinsic beauty of oil paint—its luster, its aesthetic sensuality—redeems questionable subject matter. Any subject can look good painted in oils—even objectionable subjects. The Ash Can School, and other deliberately contrarian modernist styles, exploited tasteless subject matter to show-off technique. There was nothing particularly original about bravura oil painting in the 20th Century, nothing that Manet and others hadn't done as well, but in the exploitation of really nasty subjects—not merely the banal, the pedestrian, to which the French Realists limited themselves. It was as yet a trickle before the deluge of shocking subject matter in art, of what was to come.
It is still the object of painting to subordinate the subject to the expressive qualities of oil painting, previously noticed before modernist abstraction—but never made the point of the exercise until abstraction. Today, after art's abject return to subject matter (having exhausted the possibilities of no-subject) there remains the problem of a satisfying painting experience. The homeless men which are the subject of the new pictures are painted in such a way as to reduce the eyesore effect of reality. Pitiful subject deserves pitiful technique. How to paint pitifully, without pity (much less self-pity), makes the art of the homeless a challenge.
One-of-a-kind works of art can be viewed at: https://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/1840403