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We get hold of a tube of oil paint, squeeze it out, add a bit of turpentine to thin it out, and off we go, not thinking too much about what’s actually in that tube. You need two things to make paint: a finely ground coloured powder called pigment, and something to bind your pigment so that it sticks to your chosen surface and stays there. Over the centuries, artists tried a lot of gooey stuff and for a long time, egg yolk -called Tempera painting – was a popular binder.
But tempera is difficult to blend. It dries very quickly and in order to create volume, you have to put down shading in a lot of small strokes – kind of like cross hatching. You can’t gently blend tones from light to dark. Then in the early 1400s, some chaps in the Low Countries, mainly Jan Van Eyck , discovered that if you mixed oil into your paint it was a lot more flexible and luminous and there was a big leap:
They experimented with a variety of oils – but in the end, linseed oil was the business. It is flexible, durable and importantly for us starving artist -types, affordable. You can get boiled and raw linseed oil at your hardware store, and the refined, pricier version for painting at the art shop. My love for the stuff started when I was a teen, curing my first cricket bat – it took many coatings of oil. The oil had a lovely aroma and made me think about walking onto the pitch, calmly surveying the enemy field, and then smacking a perfect cover drive like my hero Graeme Pollock.
Eventually my bat was ready for action and I found myself in a real cricket match. I was somewhere in the middle order and our openers in the Jeppe under 13 b team had not fared well. My turn came, sooner than I thought it would. I fumblingly strapped on the leg pads and headed to the middle. The bowler gave me the evil eye and then walked back to his mark. And then he walked even further back. Crikey! He came charging in from miles out . I closed my eyes and put the bat in front of me. The ball glanced off the bat and shot away, all the way to boundary. Four runs! Alas, that was my finest moment. Three deliveries later I got bowled out. Not long afterwards, I was dropped from the team and frankly I didn’t mind. Now I had more time to work on my poster of Percy Sledge.
The only drawback to linseed oil is the same thing that made it popular in the first place – it dries slowly. Artists have tried a lot of ways of speeding up the drying, not all good. The answer for me was hidden in the covers of this book, published in 1949:
There, on page 105, is the secret: sun- thickened linseed oil.
You lay out your oil in a flat dish, about half a centimetre deep, and you cover it with a glass lid. It musn’t be sealed – you leave a small gap for air flow between dish and lid. You have to be careful that dust and stuff doesn’t get into the oil, and this is difficult when you’re leaving it in the sun for a week or more. No matter what you do, stuff finds its way in. You keep your eye on it and jostle it around a bit to prevent a film forming over the top. Once the oil has reached the consistency of honey and has several bugs in it, you’re ready to go.
According to Doerner, “it dries with a certain gloss, and has been used for centuries as an excellent painting medium, by Rubens among others. It gives the colours an enamel- like character and permits, despite its viscidity, a great amount of technical freedom. Cennini (b1370 ) called it the best of oils.”
Linseed is also called flaxseed, and when cold- pressed (and definitely not left out in the sun,) you can add it to your diet. Yes people, its very good for you. Mahatma Gandhi knew that too, “whenever flaxseed becomes a regular item among the people, there will be better health,” he said.
And one last thing. Linoleum. You remember the dark brown linoleum we use to make linocuts? The main component of that sweet- smelling stuff is linseed and linseed oil too. Where would we be without the humble linseed?
Three images of dogs in painting that come to mind:
Jan van Eyck’s ” Arnolfini Wedding” from 1434 is one of the early wonders of oil painting, and it shows the superior capabilities of oil over tempera. At the feet of the bridal couple stands a little hound, a Flemish poodle of sorts, every hair of its coat meticulously present. The dog stands for fidelity, but it also announces its proud ownership of the marital couple. Below is a detail from Titian’s “The death of Acteon,” in the National Gallery, London.
It was painted in 1560 and shows Acteon being turned into a deer and set upon by his own hunting dogs. This as punishment for spying on the bathing goddess Diana. Rather harsh, that.
There is Goya’s “Head of a dog” from the early 1820’s.
Head of a Dog.(detail)
The dog appears marooned in quicksand and stares up into a vast expanse of nothingness. A remarkably modern and poignant painting, done on the walls of his farmhouse near Madrid and only seen by the public many years after his death.
I’ve done a lot of drawings of our Africanis over the last four years. Here she is with her farm buddy (the aptly named Blackie) having an afternoon nap . Unusually, both dogs kept still long enough for me to make the drawing. The Overbergian landscape was washed in with gouache and watercolour afterwards.
Two dogs sleeping. Gouache. 24 x 27 cm. 2014
So how do you draw a dog?
For starters, we can’t make rules that apply to the anatomy, like we do with the human figure. (The head goes into the body 6 times, and so on). There’s just too much variety of canine form.
I suggest you start with a sleeping dog, and get to work rapidly with a sharp pencil. Keep an eye on the negative spaces and don’t give up. You’ll soon get the hang of the alien physiology. There are no tricks, no formulas, it’s just a matter of observation and developing your visual memory. You may want to bear in mind John Ruskin’s words; “The true zeal and patience of a quarter of an hour are better than the sulky and inattentive labour of a whole day.” Your pencil will soon start to tell the truth. And hopefully the sleeping dog will lie.
Travels with Pierneef 