Thick Paint
Oil painting is a lot like modeling in clay. The material qualities of oil paint, particularly the clay-like quality of oil paint, was not expressed by artists until the middle of the 20th Century, with experiments in Abstract Expressionism.
Thick paint eventually achieved iconic status. It had connotations of richness. When artists started gilding "paintings" with Gold leaf, it was too much. It was a great fad, but at this point in time, "deep dish" abstract art is played-out. It feels too heavy, vulgar, even gross to be art. Stuffed with material excess, we feel full, suffer from indigestion. No more, please.
Abstract art by definition lacks a subject. When the subject was restored to balance the aesthetic effect, thick, heavy-impasto paint became meaningful. Aesthetics should never pander to gluttony. Excess can be, but is not necessarily, better. The intention is not to fling a load of paint and hope it hits the mark, but to conserve the subject -to let the subject be expressed. In short, drawing rediscovered.
One artist who found the Golden Mean between self-expression and fidelity to the subject was Giacometti. Giacometti figure statues are oil paintings in clay. He was a competent and original painter in oils on canvas. I suspect he excelled at clay sculpture because, as a medium, it is much less costly than expensive oil paints. When his clay figures were received with critical acclaim—and fair compensation—oil painting was relegated to minor interest by Giacometti.
Giacometti's figurative oil paintings are painted in the "wash" style of oil paint thinned with kerosene. They are rough sketches—in paint—intended to be elaborated but, for reasons of his own, left in a semi-finished state by Giacometti. The sketch is not elaborated, yielding a weak (however distinctive) aesthetic effect, expressive of the artist's impoverished circumstances. Poverty is not soon forgotten, not even after success.
While truthful, Giacometti's oil paintings feel incomplete, “unfinished.” Most of the canvas is covered by a diluted oil wash. Some canvas is allowed to show through. The parts of strongest concentration are applied—drawn—with a linear technique. Giacometti developed his iconic figurative style at a time when contemporary artists were working in pure abstraction. Perhaps, Giacometti was appalled by the excesses of thickly-painted abstraction, its cost and bulk.
It can be argued Giacometti is not an abstract artist. Statuary, and clay statuary in particular, is necessarily figurative. A powerful stone sculpture, any late Henry Moore for example, stands on the merit without figurative reference. An abstraction in clay is a nondescript lump. The abstract expressionist painter de Kooning attempted something like abstract figures in clay. The results were entertaining. The exception proves the rule: it is either a figure -or it is not.
Tacked to the wall beside my easel is a hard-copy printout of a still frame from a film of Giacometti's hands modeling clay. It serves as a reminder, to me, to model oil paint the way Giacometti modeled clay. I admire Giacometti. He proved one may paint with clay. It is my intention that my paintings of people living in the streets evoke the clay bottom of humanity.
One-of-a-kind works of art can be viewed at: https://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/1840403