Gallery Flambeau Video

Because not all paintings were meant to live forever.
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More about the Gallery Flambeau on GJ.

Rear View Tip

Here’s a handy way to get a fresh look at a painting. For just a few dollars at an auto part store you can get one of these stick-on convex mirrors.

They help you see your work in a new way because they both reverse and miniaturize your composition, making it immediately clear if you’re getting the Big Statement right.

Remember: objects in mirror are closer than they appear!

Related GJ post on getting a fresh eye and Lorrain mirrors.

Brush Washer

Here's an easy and cheap way of making a brush washer for oil painting using a glass jar and a plastic container, with kerosene as the solvent. The holes in the plastic container are made with a power drill and a 1/4 inch high speed drill.

After the jar fills up with sediment it can be discarded at the recycling center on toxic waste day.

Also check out the GJ post on Ed Ahlstrom's design for a coffee can brush washer, link.

Montgomery College

Painting teacher Ed Ahlstrom of Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland had to solve a problem: How do you manage a workroom full of more than 20 student easels?

People were tripping on them, and the heavy easels were falling over and hitting other students on the head.

He invested in a number of aluminum Stanrite easels, which are light enough to pick up with one hand. He attached a hook to the top of each easel. Then he built a storage frame in the corner of the room with a long bar where all the easels could hang together out of the way. The rack is visible behind us.

Palettes were also a problem. How do you store dozens of fully-loaded palettes? He built a special storage cabinet with slots for the rectangular plate-glass palettes. Each student writes his or her name on a piece of tape on the edge of their palette, which then slides into a numbered slot.

Taped beneath each glass palette was a gray piece of paper with a pre-printed gray scale and circles to guide the placement of the paints.

A fireproof cabinet houses the brush washers, another invention of Professor Ahlstrom. The students make the brush washers themselves out of coffee cans with lids.

At the bottom of each coffee can is a brush-scrubber made out of a 5-inch-square piece of ¼ inch gauge hardware cloth. A 1.25 inch notch is cut out of each corner so that the flaps can be folded down.

During the warm weather months, Mr. Ahlberg takes his students outdoors to paint en plein air. “We go from sunny greens to the dusty tones of autumn,” he said. Mr. Ahlstrom himself paints outdoors nearly year round (below), enjoying the colors of December in this work "Strawberry Field."

The art department has a fully-equipped jewelry shop and a graphic arts lab. “We’re one of the few schools that teaches stone lithography,” he said.

A separate building houses the communications arts department. Illustration department chairperson Martha Vaughan showed us the gallery, the computer rooms, and a room full of drawing tables.

Montgomery is a community college art program, with many hard-working commuter students who often hold down other jobs. It’s a two-year program; the students move on to many of the other art schools that have been profiled on GurneyJourney.

Montgomery College gives them a good grounding in traditional skills, and vital contact with art mentors who equip them with practical knowledge that they can use in their life work.
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Ed Ahlstrom’s website, link.

Art Department – Rockville, link.

Martha Vaughan's Communications Arts Technologies Department, Rockville, link.

Art and Influence

A bountiful new art blog called "Art and Influence," has just burst upon the scene. The blog is the work of Virginia plein-air painter Armand Cabrera and Diane Burket.

In less than a month since its inception, they have hit the ground running with dozens of posts on Armand's traditional painting instruction, mainly in oil landscapes. There is also a rich collection of biographical spotlights from art history, focusing on realist/impressionist painters of the 19th and 20th centuries, complete with quotes and bibliographies.

Many of these posts were adapted from material Armand and Diane created for the website Outdoor Painting.
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Art and Influence blog, link.
Armand Cabrera website, link.
Outdoor Painting website, link.
GJ post about painting with Armand earlier this year, link.

Brushes

I use three basic categories of brushes for oil painting: bristles, white nylon flats, and sables. The bristle brushes are made from Chinese hogs. These inexpensive brushes are stiffer than the others, and are useful for blocking in big areas, and manipulating thicker paint.

Bristle brushes are good for keeping your painting direct and simple, with a greater likelihood of getting soft edges. Generally the stiffer the brush the softer the edges. I like flats and filberts. Brights are like flats, but shorter. The Silver company makes an "extra-long filbert," which has a wonderful touch.

White nylon flats are excellent for detailed painting of architecture and technology. They’re available in widths as narrow as 1/4 of an inch to 1 inch wide brushes for laying in a transparent wash of thin paint. A flat brush should have a chisel tip, which you can use for a wide stroke or a thin line.

Nylon brushes are fairly inexpensive, but they don’t last long. Most of the manufacturers, like Dick Blick, Grumbacher, and Simmons make versions of these, and they’re all pretty good.

For small detail work, I use Kolinsky sable rounds. They're made from the reddish tail hairs of a kind of weasel, not a sable (which is a kind of marten). They’re intended for watercolor, but they work equally well for oil. These are the most expensive brushes, but they respond very sensitively to detail work.

The Winsor and Newton Series 7 has always been the standard, but they’re overpriced, and you can get good Kolinsky sables from Escoda, Silver, and other makers. Most often I use Raphael 8404, which is fairly priced, and as good as any others.