Painting on Linen: American Artist Magazine

Christopher Willard wrote a lovely piece about my paintings and working process for American Artist magazine. It focused on traditional painting surfaces, including instructions on how to prepare them (American Artist tends to focus on the nuts and bolts of making art).



On the left page I'm holding up a linen covered panel that's been traditionally sized and primed. On the right are two somewhat fuzzy reproduction of landscapes painted on Mt. Diablo, a park about twenty miles east of San Francisco. Mt Diablo has spectacular views out to the pacific in the west and to the Sierra Nevada in the east. It's the mountain that's faintly visible in this drawing, to the left of the puff of shrubbery.

(click to enlarge)

This spread shows (again, somewhat fuzzily!) a triptych landscape painting of Arch Rock, out on the Pt. Reyes coastline. I've got this painting in the studio and will put up a clean image of it before too long.

(click to enlarge)

The article was mostly about the glories of painting on properly prepared linen, as opposed to nasty cotton canvas.

If you paint in oils, and haven't tried oil primed linen as a ground, you owe it to yourself to do so. It's so much nicer.

O.