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| Mt. Hayes and the Alaska Range, by Carol L. Douglas |
Sometimes when we rework old oil paintings, there’s a
temptation to repaint the entire surface. The new paint looks lush
and full; the old paint is dull and thin. That’s particularly true when you
never got past thin layers in the first place. That old turpentine-thinned
paint has oxidized. The drying leaves a pitted surface on the top of the paint,
which appears chalky and grey.
You can bring the color back up in these passages by
varnishing, but you really shouldn’t paint into varnish or medium, no matter what
you might have read elsewhere. The “fat over lean” rule applies even to old
paintings.
If your painting is thoroughly dry, you can brush a light
coating of turpentine or mineral spirits over the painting. That will bring up
the colors of the oxidized passages long enough for you to make your
corrections. It ought to stem the urge to repaint the whole thing. Of course,
if large areas of your paintings are oxidizing, you’re not using medium
correctly.
On Friday I shot an extremely short video of myself changing
the color of the traps in a tree line. I sent this to a reader who was
wondering how much paint to use in this correction phase. It doesn’t have much
in the line of production values, but it might be helpful.
The painting of Mt. Hayes and the eastern Alaska Range was
painted near Delta Junction, Alaska. It was early in
our trans-Canada trip. Although it appeared surface dry when I wrapped it, the
thicker white paint in the river and sky squished and flattened under the
weight of subsequent paintings.
This was a simple resurfacing job—and that was a very good
thing, since I have no reference photos. It also gave me the chance
to adjust the color of the Tanana River, which looks like light chocolate milk,
it’s carrying so much silt.
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| Lake of the Woods, by Carol L. Douglas |
I’d realized after I left Lake of the Woods in western Ontario that I’d never actually finished painting in the sky. This was a very simple fix, but I used the moment to add a little warmth to the water in the foreground.
In the last painting, I corrected a lie. I’d intended
to paint a house surrounded by fields and a windbreak, but couldn’t find
the right combination of side road, farm and fields. In real
life, my subject was fronted by a low waste area of reeds but I’d edited that out.
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| Windbreak, by Carol L. Douglas |
When the glaciers from the last ice age receded, they left
behind millions of shallow depressions. These wetlands are known as ‘prairie
potholes.’ They are significant resources for plant and animal life and support
millions of breeding waterfowl, whose numbers are being threatened as the
potholes are drained for large-scale farming. I really shouldn’t have excised
them from the one scene in which they appear, and it makes me consider whether
I want to add a studio painting that does the potholes justice.
I
expected that deleting the field and reinstating the reeds would take me a long
time, but it was done in fifteen minutes or so. I will probably incise a little
more texture into the reeds, but it’s never going to be my favorite painting.
