Painting

All paint is the same idea: coloured powder held in a glue. Change the glue and you change everything, because the binder decides how fast the paint dries, whether light passes through it or bounces off it, whether you can move it tomorrow, and whether the mark you just made will still be there when it is dry. Gouache, watercolour, acrylic, oil and dye are five different glues, and a painter who knows which one they are holding is already ahead.

This note is about paint behaving. It covers the support and the ground you paint onto, the order of layers and why fat goes over lean, the difference between a glaze and a scumble and what each does to light, mixing with a limited palette so your colour stays alive, and the choice between building a painting over weeks and finishing it in one sitting. It ends with the brushstroke itself, which in fine art is never merely a way of delivering the image: a mark can describe a cheekbone and record the second and a half it took to make, at the same time. Painters working in oil, acrylic, watercolour, diluted wash and ink on bark cloth and on absorbent paper show what those decisions look like when someone means them.