The tactile joy of oil paints!

As a fiber artist, I guess it goes without saying that I enjoy media that feels good to use. I constantly pass my hands across my tapestries as I weave. I can’t seem to order knitting yarn online, because I need to know it’s touch before I can spend time knitting it. And, though I use watercolors and colored pencils to sketch, they do not please me in a tactile sense. 

But oil paints! Ah, the feel of squeezing out the thick paint onto the palette, then picking up a good glob (a technical term, I’m sure) of the color and schmeering it onto the taut canvas! Then smooshing it around to where I want it to be, and doing it all again. It really is difficult to explain it to you, but there is a true tactile-ness to painting in oils. It is the same with pastels, I know, but they are too messy for me to have loose in a studio filled with yarn. Or, at least, I am too messy with them; I can’t contain them.

I decided I needed to paint with oils again, a few weeks ago. I haven’t really had my oil paints out for a long time. So I cleared some yarn off my studio table and got out my paints. I did the portrait below first, as a warm-up, to remember how to use the paints. Then I did the portrait above, of my granddaughter. Neither are grand works of ART, but both were so satisfying to do!

I need to now get back to the loom, having scratched this itch. I need to clear the work table of paint supplies, to make room again for the yarn I’m using for my current tapestry. The oil paints will be packed back into the cupboard, the brushes cleaned and put away, these two paintings set aside somewhere to dry, and the palette wrapped tightly and stuck in the freezer, with the hope that I will feel the need to use the paint left on it another day in the not too distant future.