A couple of days ago a mad (crazy) painter friend had seen this video (below) that I had just posted and shot me off a question. He wanted to know why I was using an oil stick to sketch out the image I had planned to paint up instead of using the time honored method of using charcoal.

This ends up being a story that goes back a year or so ago when I felt change was in the air. I knew my work was going to change and I was exploring ideas of how to accommodate this change. For some time, I’d been painting pretty darned tight, and it was exhausting me. Day after day of fineline pencil marks creating exacting imaging that would have to be just as exact once I started painting that same image. When I journeyed into a looseness, it would be with charcoal instead of graphite – the only thing was, my charcoal was also in pencil form, working only when sharpened like a regular pencil. Using charcoal allowed me to think I was getting loose (okay, I do recognize that holding the pencil sideways does allow some some casual stroking to happen) when I really was still in that same old comfort zone of control, control, control. At the time, I was recognized as someone who was quite spontaneous, but the thing was that my work only looked spontaneous, while in reality it was all tight, meticulous and well-planned.

So, it was loose that I was looking for, but avoiding quite well.

I will add admittedly that its not the graphite or charcoal pencils that made my work so tediously tight, it was just the view I held of how pencils work, and how my work worked. I know also that I could get some kind of fat charcoal stick and go at things loosely if I chose, but I encountered these oil sticks instead (the ones I discuss in the video below), a product that works perfectly with oil paints and requires no special treatment outside of the normal care and finishing of any other oil paint that comes out of a tube. Oil sticks are oil paint. Oils sticks dry just like oil paints. Oil sticks are really smooth, and slide around with such ease on the canvas they just ooze oodles and oodles of buttery looseness and rubbery paradise!

Its this quality that lends itself to the changes that were set in motion a year ago or so, those changes that led up to my switching over to oil paints from acrylics, those changes that led me to using these fat, lovable oil sticks, those changes that led to my moving into the expressive realm of art via figurative painting, and those changes that have allowed me to finally loosen up a whole helluva lot!!!