Some interesting things I learned.

[gottawonder]

Going to the art gallery yesterday made me wonder about the kind of paint they used for those religious icons; tempera paint.

So, I found out that most artists used to use tempera paint at one time. It is pure pigments mixed with egg yolk, so it's non-toxic, and no surprises with what's in the paint for pigment because you mixed it yourself. You have to paint on a special background of chalk gesso, usually layered onto a board and sanded smooth. It dries the paint out really quickly, so it means that it's hard to get blending with tempera paint. The paint has to go on in very thin layers, or it cracks as it dries.

Tempera paint is apparently still the best paint for longevity, if it's done properly. The pigments don't discolor the way oil paints do, and they stay vibrant and pure without bleeding into each other over time. I can attest that the paintings I saw from the 17th century had a real crispness and vibrancy to them.

Then oil painting came along, and people liked that you could use it on canvas, and could roll it up, and could blend the paints and get different effects, and that it dried slowly so you could mess with it longer, and so on. Very little work was done in tempera after that.

Then there was kind of a resurgence in it, as people started using it to do religious works again, to capture the feeling of these older paintings. Also, some fairly modern artists use tempera, one of whom was Andrew Wyeth. I did NOT know that, and it makes me really want to see some of his tempera paintings in person, because I bet there is a really interesting sharpness to that work that you wouldn't see in reproductions. I also learned that his son painted a bit with tempera (Jamie Wyeth), and that he painted a picture that I use as my computer wallpaper (I didn't know who the artist was). The picture is titled "Homer" (watercolor, not tempera). I am drawn to it, because it reminds me of a dog from my young adulthood, Spud.