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.