Paint Review: Potter's Pink PR233

A couple of years ago an unexpectedly detailed reply to an email unlocked a whole new world for me. It was when I'd first spotted Pip Seymour's paints in Cornelissen's; there were strange colours I had never heard of and a lack of knowledge made choice difficult so I asked Pip whether there was a starter set or any information. What came back was an enormous email, where different sources had been copied and pasted to give an overview of the qualities of every paint in his range. This changed my view of paint in general and the the repercussions are still echoing through my practice. One of the colours which intrigued me enough to include it in the second batch I bought was Potter's Pink. I've now been using it for long enough to share my thoughts.

Character

Dusky and delicate are key the words. Potter's Pink is a very soft colour which is either warm or cold depending on context. Whichever side of neutral it appears, it is a colour born of the shadows. There are two variants, a lighter, brighter and more luminous version and a softer, duller and duskier version (see inside the caps of the tubes in the picture to see the difference in mass tone). As an oil paint (Pip Seymour's - looks like the dark version), it has a low tinting power and is semi-tranparent. In water-colour (W&N, looks like the bright version) it is quite granular and more intense - almost a rose rather than a pink. According to two pigment suppliers, Kremer and Rublev, it is safe to use in any medium but according to Cornelissen it is only recommended for aqueous media. It produces incredibly delicate mixes and is beautiful when used as a glaze or under another glaze. As you would expect of a colour with its origins in ceramics, it is lightfast and, when used with the right binder, very tough.

History

Sometimes known as Pinkcolour, Tin Pink or, in Germany, Nelkenfarbe (Carnation colour), Potter's Pink has its modern English name for a reason; it was invented by an unknown potter in Staffordshire late in the 18th century. It was one of the first "modern" pigments and, just like a huge amount of modern synthetic and stable colours, it is a metallic oxide. It has always primarily been a pigment for ceramics but Winsor & Newton introduced it as a water-colour under the Pinkcolour name in the 19th century. It was the first stable pink available in this country, far pinker than local earths and without the treacherousness of Madders.

As with so many of the older colours it fell out of favour as brighter, more powerful and cheaper alternatives were discovered. Currently it is available as a watercolour from Daniel Smith, Rublev, Pip Seymour and Winsor & Newton, as oil paint from Pip Seymour, as pigment from Kremer, Rublev and Cornelissen and as a pigment in an aqueous dispersion from Rublev so there are signs of a revival, especially as a watercolour pigment. If I've missed a manufacturer, please let me know via the comments.

In Use

I have been using Potter's Pink extensively in oils (Pip Seymour's). I find the mixing power to be low so real care has to be taken when selecting colours to mix it with; many newer colours are virulent in mixes and will simply obliterate it. As a result I tend to use it almost unmixed, either as a delicate glaze or as a gentle block of colour.

The clouds here are built from layers of Davy's Grey, Charcoal Grey, Cobalt Blue and Lemon Yellow (PY31 not the more common PY3) over a bright white gesso. Other parts of the sky are areas of Cobalt Blue, Cerulean, Zinc White and Flake White. Parts of the clouds have then been given an irregular barely-there glaze in Potter's Pink for warmth and richness. Its warmth has largely neutralised the cold grey but because it is applied unevenly and over many colours it gives a pulsating life to the clouds and helps them change colour with the light. There is also a gesture of more thickly applied Potter's Pink to help define the cloud and bring out the pinkness elsewhere.

Here is a painting with more widespread use of the colour. At the edges of picture it is over cold, dark areas. In the centre it is applied with varied opacity over Cadmium Yellow Deep. Towards the bottom right it is mixed with white. Elsewhere there is a very light scumbling, but it doesn't show so well at this size. It shows the ease with which the paint can mixed optically to make a wide range of glowing but delicate colours.

Potter's Pink mixed with oils on left (clockwise from top left) on its own, with Ultramarine Red, Titanium White, Raw Sienna, Cobalt Blue, Titanium Orange, Viridian, Ultramarine, Davy's Grey, Lemon Yellow (PY31). Mixed with miscellaneous watercolours on right - I especially like the burnt quality it gives Vermillion and the way it brings out the lurid green undertones of Lemon Yellow (PY3) at the bottom.

Above are a range of mixes. I have only dabbled with it in watercolour (Winsor & Newton) as I don't use the medium very often. It mixes far better as it is the brighter, stronger variant, giving a range of oh-so delicate but luminous colours. Liz Steel has another set of less random watercolour experiments here.

Final thoughts

I find there to be a real lack of subtlety in much modern painting and I think this is due in part to contemporary trends in materials. In paint manufacturers' scramble for pigment load, intensity and purity of colour at one end of the market and a combination of brightness and economy at the other, colours have been getting brighter, brasher and more garish and the more delicate, understated colours have been left behind. As anyone who was fortunate enough to see the Veronese exhibition at the National Gallery last year will know, a skilled painter can make less intense colours sing out as brightly as one could want through a mixture of careful juxtapositions and the use of glazes. When this is done, the resulting painting can be bright and colourful without becoming garish. The same painting made from modern "sledgehammer" colours would be inescapably garish. By the same token, if an artist wants a subdued or delicate painting - maybe for a portrait, a flower or an overcast day - starting from a modern palette of cadmiums, azos and pthalos is making life un-necessarily difficult. Artists benefit from the bright, intense palette of today but I strongly urge them not to discount the older, more delicate colours. Potter's Pink is as useful and practical an example as any.

Paint Review: Pip Seymour Extra Fine and Early Oils

Finally, after months of painting and much musing, I'm ready to write down my thoughts on Pip Seymour's unusual approach to paint making.

Any colourman setting out to make artist quality paints is faced with several problems. He seeks to make a paint which is clean and intense, which is stable in the tube, predictable in handling, consistent in drying and long lasting on the canvas. Easy? No. Paints are made from, at a minimum, pigment and a binder - in the case of oil paints the binder will be a drying oil like linseed, poppy or walnut. The pigment defines the colour and the binder turns it into a paste which is capable of becoming a tough film - in other words it turns it into paint. The difficulties arise because every pigment has different characteristics. Colour is the obvious one, but transparency, drying times, texture, robustness during grinding and mulling, lightfastness and other characteristics vary hugely. So how does a colourman go from making one simple paint to making a cohesive range? He will blend different pigments together to combine characteristics, he might add drying agents to make drying more predictable, fillers to make the intensity more consistent and reduce his costs, different amounts of oil or different types of oil to try and get the stiffness of the different paints consistent and doubtless he can perform all sorts of tricks I haven't heard of to help with factors like shelf life. Different brands take different approaches to these options. Ultra-premium brands like Harding and Williamsburg will use as much pigment as possible and the minimum of everything else that is necessary to give the characteristics they want - very intense and often quite stiff paints. Some brands like W&N use different oils with different pigments to try to attain consistency and place an emphasis on usability even if intensity has to suffer a little as a result. And so it goes, with each range taking a subtly different approach consistent with their budget and their philosophy.

Seymour, however, appears to have had a long, hard think about these approaches and concluded "Bollocks to that!" Instead he has roamed Europe and further afield, seeking out both good conventional pigments and historic, obsolete and esoteric pigments and, instead of trying to turn them into a consistent range, he has turned them into paints that celebrate the differences between the pigments. The differences are epic and they are the reason this review has taken so long. These paints have a steep learning curve. You can use them first time out, but it will take a while before you start to get the best out of them so I waited until I was sure I had the hang of them before passing judgement.

Over the last few months I have been regularly using his Titanium Orange, Victoria Green, Cumbria Iron Ore (Florence Mine), English Green Earth, Davy's Grey and Roman Black Earth. Many of you will only have heard of one of those colours before and some may have heard of two more.

Titanium Orange is the "most normal" paint here. It is a dusky orange and, as you might expect, it has many of the qualities of titanium white - in particular it is a simple colour and the most opaque of the paints here. It is just a good quality oil paint that anyone would be happy to use and it happens to be a phenomenally useful colour for round here - one use I have taken advantage of in studies and sketches is mixing it with pthalo blue. In different proportions the mix is a very good starting point for foliage from late August right through to the end of autumn, at least for trees like oaks which just go straight from brown-green to orange-brown without ever being flamboyant. As a combination it ticks another box of mine; mixing an opaque and a transparent colour. This works for me as varying the thickness of the paint creates very subtle variations in the apparent colour without further effort.

WIth Victoria Green, we are getting more interesting. Seymour says it is unique, a throwback to the 19th century. This is an out and out glazing colour, very weak, easily dominated when mixed with other colours and very transparent. It is a beautiful, soft and almost silvery green and I stand by what I said in my first impressions; that it is the colour of South East England in summer in the sort of rain that is so fine it is almost mist. To put it into terms that painters stand a chance of understanding it is perhaps like a Terre Verte with all hints of earthiness removed; it is cleaner, clearer and softer but shares many of the same characteristics and, when alongside each other on canvas, you could believe they are related. When they come out of the tube it is obvious they are not though. While the Terre Vertes that I have used feel like regular, lean paint, Victoria Green is softer, runnier and oilier. Indeed the first tube I received could be poured from the tube. The retailer fired off an email to Pip, and later the same day a replacement was on its way to me which was much more paint-like but still very, very soft. It perhaps sums up Seymour's approach better than the others here. It is a difficult paint to use. It really needs to be combined with a medium (I've been using the quick drying glaze medium from the same range) to help tame it and make it more controllable. I suspect there is a reason the pigment became obsolete and it is possible that there are difficulties making a paint that stays homogenised in the tube for a long time. The replacement had no issues so I may have just been unlucky. The thing I really want to get over with this paint though is that it is worth accepting the difficulties and learning to use it well. It is simply beautiful and wonderfully delicate. It provides solutions when I suspect nothing else would. Just use a good glaze medium with it and you'll be fine.

The other paints don't go to the same extremes. The Cumbria Iron Ore is an intense paint with a soft feel and a slightly gritty texture out of the tube. It is like rusty mud on the palette, but again is utterly transformed as a glaze into a fiery, rust coloured glow with violet undertones. English Green Earth, again from a named quarry, is a very delicate, transparent, gritty green-grey earth. Davy's Grey is what you'd expect, but hand-dug from a specific quarry. Roman Black Earth is a warm, transparent black which actually gives life to colours instead of killing them stone dead as many blacks do and without which my nocturnes would have been very different indeed. Doubtless the pattern is becoming clear. Seymour's oils come from specific, named and often traditional sources which have been chosen for very specific characteristics and they are often awkward to work with unless used in conjunction with a medium. The variation in characteristics is such that if you were to read a review of one colour, you would not be able to apply that review to any other colour in the range. Just because you like the sound of one doesn't mean the others will suit you, and just because you don't like the description of another doesn't the range has nothing for you. Each paint in the range has to be taken on its own merits.

So where does that leave us? I love the paints to bits but I'd be reluctant to recommend them as they are so unusual and the learning curve won't suit many (maybe even most) people. Certainly if you're a beginner I wouldn't choose them as a starting point. If the idea of esoteric, historic and delicate colours made into paints that play to each pigment's strengths and weaknesses appeals though, definitely give them a go. They reward effort and are genuinely beautiful. To be honest, the range has set me questioning the approach taken by brands like Michael Harding and their never-ending quest for intense colour. Working with delicate paints has been refreshing and if anything they make mixing real-world colours easier than the ultra-strong colours from MH.

One size fits all is not an approach that applies to art. It is pleasing to find a manufacturer who doesn't think it apples to art materials either.

Its Christmas!

This month, for the first time in a while, there wasn't too much pressure on my materials budget so I've taken the plunge and bought myself half a dozen of the Pip Seymour paints I mentioned a few months back. Today, they arrived.

First up, a quick word about where I got them from, Pegasus Art. They have the biggest selection from the range that I've found, the swatches on the website are remarkably accurate (as long as your screen is set up correctly) and, very importantly, the order was the best packed box of art materials I have ever received through the post. Jacksons in particular should sit up and take notice of how well this outfit pack things.

Today I'm just going to give first impressions of the paint - you'll see why! As many of the colours in the range are unique and there is very little in the way of independent, unbiased information on the web I will look at some of the individual colours when I've spent quality time with them.

I bought English Green Earth, Davy's Grey, Roman Black Earth, Victoria Green, Cumbria Pure Iron Ore and Titanium Orange. Not the most obvious selection, but I was thinking about gaps in my paint box and the oncoming autumn and winter. Of these, 3 are unique (Green Earth, Victoria Green and Iron Ore) and a fourth - the black - is only available from one other supplier as far as I can find. One of the things I find particularly compelling about the range is that Pip is very specific in his information - the iron ore comes from the Florence deep mine on the Furness peninsula while the green earth and Davy's grey both come from the same quarry in Oxfordshire.

Pip says on the website that, whereas other manufacturers try and be consistent across their range, he wants to mill each pigment as if it were done by hand, adjusting the amount of milling to emphasise that pigment's fundamental character which, depending on your point of view, is either a revival of traditional production when each studio would make its own paint or the paint-maker's equivalent of modernism. This is the overwhelming first impression. Tested blind you would not believe they were all from the same maker, and the fact you like or dislike one paint can't be used to predict your reaction to the rest of the range. This is the quality that will either appeal immensely to you or put you off the range for good. Its difficult to communicate just how far Pip pushes this. If you buy a tube of bog standard, high street artist-quality paint or one from most of the pro-quality paints like Michael Harding you can read a lot into that tube because every other tube of paint from that manufacturer will be very similar. Each pigment will have its own characteristics in terms of opacity, how strong it is in a mix and - to a lesser degree - how much oil the pigment has been mixed into (aka how fat the colour is) but fundamentally the entire range will have a similar consistency (Harding tends to be stiffer than W&N for example) and a similar pigment load and approach to fillers and bulking things out (again, Harding tends to be far more intensely coloured than W&N). A few makers, like Williamsburg, embrace the variation between pigments and make different colours have different characteristics - some may be thicker, some more intense, others slightly gritty - but I have never come across one that takes this to the same extreme as Pip Seymour. The English Green Earth has visible particles in it and gives a clearly visible texture, even in just my first manipulations on a piece of scrap. The Cumbria Iron Ore feels gritty and looks like fine mud in texture. The Titanium Orange looks and feels like a normal high end paint. I can't overstate the difference between individual colours, and this is why I will look at them individually when I understand them better.

I was going to put up a picture of the colours as I have squeezed out a little and played with them, but I've played too much and it would be confusing. Follow the Pegasus link above and you'll see decent but small swatches. For now it will suffice to say that a palette of Green Earth, Davy's Grey, Roman Black Earth along with Raw Umber, Ivory Black, a couple of whites and whatever green suits your local area will make an awesome palette for winter landscapes on those days when at first glance everything is monochrome, that as I suspected Victoria Green is the colour of Southern England during spring and summer rain, that the iron ore is very close to Burnt Sienna in hue but it is far more transparent and it behaves differently and that the Roman Black Earth might just be the answer to a lot of painters' prayers - a black which is lively, a black which doesn't kill a picture stone dead, a black which is subtle and transparent. I've avoided black for such a long time, seeing it as a very blunt tool, but this one is possibly going to be the most useful colour I've bought today.

Anyway, in short, really really really not for everyone! Indeed I wouldn't want them to be the only paints available to me, but it looks like they will provide solutions and opportunities that nothing else will. Most of the colours will need time, experimentation and understanding - there are some you can just pick up and use like any paint but others are strange beasts that will need to be learned. Its really nice to see a manufacturer doing something entirely on his own terms.

I'll report back when I've got the hang of them.

Review: Roberson's Oil Primer

Some materials happen by default. You use them because you've always used them. In the case of primer I, and I suspect the majority of painters out there, default to acrylic gesso. There are actually sound reasons - it dries quickly, is affordable, can be used below both oils and acrylics, can be sanded down to an ultra-smooth surface (depending on what you've applied it to), is easy to clean up and has a useful amount of absorbency - but for many the actual reason will be that pre-made canvases come primed with it, so it's a familiar and natural choice when stretching your own or preparing boards.

Familiar and default do not necessarily mean best. I am now near the end of a painting I've been hacking away at for the last two months, and it will be the first painting I have completed with Roberson's Oil Primer.

This primer is perhaps the anti-gesso. Whiteness aside it is different in every way, from chemistry to application and to the way it takes paint. What makes it so different? Firstly, its an oil paint. It cannot be used beneath acrylic paint, clean up involves spirits or solvents and in the tin it smells and looks a lot like domestic gloss paint. Secondly, it has an extra ingredient: China clay - that's right, the stuff they used to dig up in Cornwall to make English porcelain.

In practice, this makes all the difference in the world. The runny consistency - like gloss paint whereas gesso is more like emulsion - makes it easy and quick and messy to apply but it gives you a choice - it lets you brush out most of your strokes but it doesn't self-level so it will retain your marks if you'd prefer. This decision will have implications further down the line for your painting so think hard! The marks it retains are more fluid and flowing than those retained by acrylic gesso and I have found they give an interesting surface well suited to woodland when applied chaotically. I suspect this would be just as useful for portraiture and figure work.

The other difference the clay makes is that the primer is far less absorbent than acrylic gesso especially when two coats are applied. This is the key difference and leads to a different way of working. Firstly, paint takes a lot longer to touch-dry. Not only does the drying time increase but, given a strong enough surface, brute force and solvent can knock back areas even weeks after they've been painted. Secondly, the almost watercolour techniques I use in the lower levels of a painting behave fundamentally differently. On gesso, as you've seen from my skies, the paint sinks in and gives a real softness, especially when worked over with a rag. On the oil primer, I'm more sparing with the technique due to the old "fat over lean" rule, but where I have used it it looks more like a stain than a wash. When worked over with a rag, you achieve a more mottled softness, and the brush marks in the primer give the colour a real complexity which is why it suits foliage so well. It also means it enlivens fairly flat areas of transparent colour as more paint is retained in the furrows. This applies to any glaze you add later on. Thirdly, thicker paint behaves very differently too. The primer is slippery where acrylic gesso is grippy - paint really can be pushed around and this can even get out of hand if your brush is too stiff. In fact you have far more options for manipulating paint but the paint is harder to control.

So there we have it, the anti-gesso. The two primers are truly worlds apart and experimentation is needed to see which suits you best. I will have both in my armoury from now on; acrylic gesso for the simpler, softer compositions, wide skies and wide spaces like the night paintings I am working on and oil primer for the more textured subjects like the avenue at Ankerwycke that is almost finished, for more complex compositions where I'll be changing my mind a lot and for subjects in front of a distinct and plain background.

Paint review: Winsor & Newton AOC Flake White No 1

Until relatively recently, lead based paints were the only high quality whites available to artists and there is a long tradition of their use. In recent years however lead based paints have been increasingly outlawed for reasons of Health and Safety. There are valid reasons for this and they do present a genuine risk if consumed, breathed in or worked extensively with bare skin. I was never too bothered about their disappearance until recently as I'd always been happy with titanium white, erroneously thinking white is white. Others knew better though, so many artists have been up in arms as ban after ban has come in. Lucien Freud famously bought pretty much the entire stock of his supplier of choice's Cremnitz when restrictions first loomed on the horizon. As of this year, Winsor and Newton are perhaps the only source of affordable genuine lead based whites in the UK. This is because, although in the EU there are exemptions in place allowing lead based paint to be sold to artists, the loss of every other market means that pigment manufacturers don't bother making the raw pigment that paint makers use. Niche manufacturers like my favourite, Michael Harding, make their own pigment but this leads to astronomical costs, so kudos to W&N for going against the grain.

"A warm white, made from completely opaque and permanent pigment, Flake White is a fast drier and mixes very well with other pigments, reducing their colors softly due to its low tinting strength... Desired by oil painters for its mixing qualities and pure whiteness, Flake White creates an astonishingly durable and flexible paint film. It was once commonly used as a base layer on canvas due to the strength the pigment gave to the paint film. Conservationists note that sections of oil paintings containing Flake White withstand time better than those without." W&N website

Sounds good!

Over the last few months I have been working my way through a tin of genuine Flake White and it has been a revelation. On opening the can and digging in a trowel, the first impression is one of stiffness combined with softness. This paint is even stiffer than the Williamsburg Umber I reviewed a couple of months ago. Soft brushes are not a viable option unless the paint is mixed with other paints or modified with thinners or a medium. Having spent the time adjusting to this I like this aspect of the paint. Unmodified it holds marks and textures far better than any paint I have ever used and adding thinners or a medium is hardly a hardship.

Applied on its own, unless it is applied impasto, it has far less covering power than my titanium white. For my method of applying translucent and transparent layers of colour this is a huge advantage, especially as it interacts with the colour it is going over far more subtly than the other whites. Equally, as W&N say, it is far softer in a mix, making it much easier to get controlled tints than with the sledgehammer that is titanium. For tints I would say Ti is brightest and harshest, Zinc is crispest and cleanest and Flake is softest.

Using three whites, often in the same painting, has been an education. As the three are noticeably different colours and have substantially different characteristics, making tints from the same colour with different whites creates very subtle relationships. This is what my Enwhitenment project will explore in due course (the missing ingredient, Cremnitz (Names of lead based whites have shifted over time - usually a mix of lead carbonate PW1 and zinc oxide PW4 is known as Flake white whereas pure PW1 is known as Cremnitz where historically it was a reflection of origin and pigment quality -far more heavily loaded with pigment and accordingly with a different, more stringy texture and apparently it has more of a glow in tints), is available again but I can't afford it right now) in a more formal way. Zinc is coldest and clearest - see the patches of blue sky in my work, which is pthalo blue with zinc - Ti the whitest and Flake the warmest.

Overall, I adore this paint. It has become my default white. I frequently use it with Zinc as a counterpoint and have all but abandoned Titanium. It mixes easily and the range of textures is glorious. The fact that it is as close as white comes to being translucent is a huge bonus for my way of working.

Thoroughly recommended.

Paint review: WIlliamsburg Raw Umber

As I have explained before, returning to painting after a prolonged break has left me with a lot of investigating to do and this includes exploring different paints. One brand that caught my eye straight away was Williamsburg who are based in Brooklyn. Its a similar story to Michael Harding, one slightly obsessive person being seduced by the craft of traditional paint making and things growing organically from local roots. In some respects their philosophies seem similar too, being about mixing as much high quality pigment as possible in as little high quality oil as possible. There appear to be differences though; Harding's paints are remarkably consistent across every colour I've tried whereas Williamsburg make a virtue of each paint being different because it reflects the different qualities of each pigment. In practice, I was expecting this to mean paints of a similar quality to Harding, but with more character.

So, Raw Umber.

First impressions is that this is an incredibly stiff paint which is difficult to get out of the tube. Second impressions were "This is not Raw Umber!" Third impression, after reading the label and comparing with other brands is "This is actually Raw Umber, the other things I've used aren't." In fact, the fine print declares the pigment to be PBR7, Natural Iron Oxide with Manganese. I am used to PBr6, Synthetic Iron Oxide. The difference isn't noticeable when first squeezed onto the palette but very noticeable in use.

It is the coldest, dirtiest, muddiest umber I have used, and for my purposes this is a good thing. In use, it is more opaque than I was expecting and is not as stiff as the tube fooled me into believing - it holds marks well but brushes out fine when required - with the caveat that it works better with stiff brushes than soft ones. The difference in pigment is most noticeable when mixing colours. I like to use umber mixed with ultramarine to give a rich pseudo-black for some of the silty, composty riverbank mud because it is very dark but when brushed out very thinly it takes on the colours of indian ink. This is useful for me because under the black layer of silt here there is usually clay. With the Williamsburg paint, this no longer works. To get the same effect, I have found it necessary to switch to Prussian Blue. I can't quite work out whether that is due to the slight difference in hue or whether the Williamsburg actually affects a mix more intensely so needs a more powerful blue to have the same effect. I suspect from the stiffness it is just incredibly densely loaded with pigment.

So where does that leave us? I think there is room for both the Harding and the Williamsburg versions in my paintbox. At this level, better and worse don't apply, things are just different from each other and more or less suited to particular situations. The Harding is smoother, maybe even more forgiving and is easier to use on smooth surfaces and gradations of colour. The Williamsburg is gnarlier, earthier and more interesting. I will use the Harding lower down in the painting, for traditional underpainting, for areas where it will peek through and modify subsequent layers of paint and for areas of flat colour. I will save the Williamsburg for higher layers in the painting, for texture and for playing in the mud.

Looking through the colour charts, Williamsburg appear to have an unrivalled range of earth colours; I look forwards to trying these; but I confess I am wary and unsure about how the approach evident in this tube would play out in the brighter colours - could they be too extreme? I hope to find out some time in the next couple of months.

Paint review: Winsor & Newton AOC Cobalt Violet Dark

Brand loyalty is a funny thing. I freely admit to being a snob, but I would never think of myself as a brand snob. Yet I have huge loyalty to particular paints. Whilst this is partly down to the practicalities of having learned a particular paint, it is also in part snobbery - an irrational belief that one brand is best. Those of you who have been paying attention may have worked out that last time round I was Michael Harding man and I still am.

One thing that being away from art taught me is that there is no universal best, only best for a particular set of criteria. So recently I have made it my business to find out about alternative sources of paint and I have several interesting things on order. The first to arrive is the now discontinued Winsor & Newton Artists Oil Colour Cobalt Violet Dark.

W&N is a brand I have largely ignored. Their ubiquity makes them easy to dismiss; it is natural to assume a small atelier full of craftsman will make a better product than a factory. There is also a temptation to see them as old fashioned, doing exactly the same thing for decades and yet isn't the use of traditional techniques key to the way Harding, Old Holland et al promote themselves? W&N have fiercely loyal clientele, but again this is easy to dismiss as the ones who shout about it tend not to be very "Alan", for better or for worse. This loyalty speaks volumes though and begs an interesting question - when it comes to raw materials should one prioritise absolute quality of product or consistency between batches and reliability of supply?

All things considered, when I stumbled across a chap selling this paint at £4.75 for 21ml versus an RRP of £42 for 40ml of Harding's I thought it worth a punt. After all, he particularly states that this particular paint is the equal of the Harding and Mussini equivalents in appearance and handling. It uses the same pigment Cobalt Phosphate PV14 but in safflower oil. It seems to me a non-yellowing oil like safflower is critical for a purple in spite of its darkness as yellow is the complementary colour of purple - any yellowing will therefore lead to a greying and de-saturating of the colour so I'm pleased they avoided linseed.

First impressions are awesome!

What a colour. This is the archetypal regal purple. This is the colour Cadbury's wrappers dream about at night. It is truly imperial.

Second impressions are pretty good too! Smeared on the palette the colour is clean, even and bright. Consistency is soft and smooth and it forms nice peaks on the palette which bodes well for brush marks. It claims to be and seems to be semi-transparent too, with good enough covering power when required. Mixed with white it is strong enough but immediately controllable - it doesn't feel like it will overly dominate in the way that say a pthalocyanine will. Mixed with a couple of other colours it is doing what I'd hoped - yellow ochre produces a rich but subtle mustard-brown a lot like our clay and this mixture with a lot of white and a touch of blue is a good starting point for the smooth, young tree trunks round here. The mix I'm really excited about is optical though - a brushed out and scumbled combination with umbers and ultramarine for the rainbow-coloured black mud that characterises the wooded parts of the riverbank; a treacherous but fertile mix of rotted leaves and silt. I've been underpainting with a thin wash of vermillion that lets the canvas glow through like a watercolour, then applying these colours grunge-ily over the top.

As far as mark making and brush strokes are concerned, I'm not the ideal person to ask as I rarely go near impasto and I'm not interested perfectly smooth areas of transition or flat colour. The relatively thick marks I have made have held their shape well enough, though at only a millimetre or so off the surface of the canvas I haven't been demanding. Equally, in areas where I have tried to brush my marks out the paint has responded well. It seems happy enough blending wet-in-wet too.

The only thing I'm not quite comfortable with is that it feels different to the Harding's I'm used to. Under the brush it is a little softer and squidgier. That's not a bad thing from my point of view but it may have implications for very thick brush marks where the painter requires every bristle mark to stand proud.

Overall I'm very pleased. On first encounter this appears to be a very competent paint in a spectacular but versatile colour and I hope as I learn how to use it it will seem better and better. It has been a very pleasant surprise.

A plea

Back in the day I saw paintings by Sean Scully. I forget where and they were, maybe New York, maybe 90's, no matter. As ever, his work was monumental with simple, painterly stripes of alternating colours. The paintings I remember were exploring olives, earths and greys. These colours were thickly painted over a bright ground which peeked through here and there between the stripes.You will rarely see a more convincing exploration of how colours affect each other.

These works changed my attitude and were the beginning of a love affair with colour, although back then I didn't realise it. The practical effect was not evident for some years but in due course, I found I would use a searing bright orange for my underpaintings. It would glow through the colours, tying them together and would wink at you through any gaps in the paint.

It wasn't just a random orange though. Used with care it could burn your eyes, but it was also versatile in a mix - strong enough to hold its own but not so strong as to overwhelm the colours it was mixed with. It was semi-transparent, could be knocked back enough to let the canvas shine through, used with a medium in a very clear glaze or lifted off with a cloth to leave delicate almost peach-coloured staining. Used thickly and with planning it could appear to be opaque too.

The paint in question is Orange Lake by Michael Harding. It is no longer available. I am looking at alternatives - Michael Harding themselves recommend Permanent Orange as being a different colour with similar characteristics - but in the mean time, if anyone out there has any usable surplus they would sell at a reasonable price, please get in touch!

Left: neat Orange Lake squeezed from the remnants of a ten year old tube - Centre right: mixed with Michael Harding Lemon Yellow - Top right corner: mixed with Atlantis Yellow Lake