On Saturday I spent the day in a figurative workshop with Master Artist Osamu Obi at the Museu Europe d'Art Modern in Barcelona.  This beautiful place is where I also take classes.  Osamu Obi gave an introduction to how he became interested in oils as opposed to the traditional Japanese historical inclination to use watercolor.  His father, a professor of European history, would expose his own children to the great art of Velasquez, Rembrandt, Rubens...once a week with slides and readings.  Osamu was so struck by one of Rembrandt's self-portraits that he felt he must learn to paint in oil.  He gave a brief slide show and when he zoomed in on the nose, eyes, mouth of the Rembrandt painting you could understand his excitement:  the brushstrokes, the colors, the energy.  

 

The video here shows Osamu Obi demonstrating the medium which he creates himself.  He beats the yolk of an egg with vinegar and linseed oil until it is the consistency of thick mayonnaise.  It smelled like Spanish alioli!  This is what he uses at certain stages of his process.  After first preparing his substrate with his own gesso, he applies an earth color to the entire surface (imprimatura).  This is allowed to dry completely.  In the demo he began with Van Dyke brown thinned with turpentine to scrub into the dried surface to make it more porous and absorptive for the next layer of paint.  He then sketched the figure in with paint.  At home in his studio he will do a detailed drawing in pencil, fixing it with a thin glue layer, and then apply the imprimatura.  The imprimatura not only allows for the artist to place down more accurate tonal values, it provides a luminosity to the final painting as the first color reflects through the succeeding paint layers.  He stressed while sketching the model that one should not just focus on the figure itself but the space around the figure.  There were 20 people in the workshop and we had two models.  We all used his medium to paint and I enjoyed its consistency and flow quality it gave to my paint.  I spent most of my time watching him paint instead of actually painting myself.  He uses lead white and joked that he does not eat it and in 30 years has never experienced any effects from the toxicity.  He used Silver White pigment made in Japan.  He mixes his medium into the white pigment and then began to paint.  Watching his strokes was mesmerizing, meditative, inspiring.

 

"Accomplished artists are those who have proved themselves to be the best at what they do. 'Master' is the title often given to such a person, and rightly so: They've established themselves as worthy of the title through many years of study, and devotion of their lives to their craft." Daniel J. Keys, artist