6 x 8
(c) Lesley Powell 2013
(c) Lesley Powell 2013
Ah, the humble paint tube. We take metal (and now plastic) screw-top tubes for granted nowadays. They appear everywhere, holding everything from toothpaste to ointments. But they were a breakthrough in their time, and revolutionized the course of painting. Renoir is quoted as having said "Without colors in tubes, there would be no Cezanne, no Monet, no Pissaro, and no Impressionism".
Why was the paint tube revolutionary? Two reasons: (1) it let you re-seal paint to keep it fresh, and (2) it let you take the paint outside the studio and work en plein air. For today, I am going to focus on #1.
Re-sealing the paint was a huge development, because oil paints start to dry out and harden as soon as they are exposed to air. Once exposed to air, paint will only stay useable for a day or two at most. Before the mid-1800's, artists stored their paint in pigs' bladders to
avoid exposing it to the air. The bladders were notoriously messy, and tended to burst. They were opened by piercing with a tack. Once opened, they could not be resealed.
All of that changed with the advent of the metal paint tube. And we owe it to a fellow Carolinian--John G. Rand, from South Carolina--who patented it in 1841. The metal of the tube was impermeable, and with the screw-on lid it would stay airtight. You could open and close the tube as often as you wished, without the paint spoiling.
With this new invention, paint would last almost indefinitely. Before the tube, when an artist opened a bladder of paint, he needed to use it all before it spoiled. Thus, painters of old would paint all of the blue areas of a painting when they opened the bladder of blue--needing to finish before the paint oxidized. Then they would move on to the next color, and do the same.
With the advent of the tube, painters could open all of their pigments at once. No more worry about wasting paint--the right quantity could be squeezed from the tube, and the tube could be resealed to preserve the rest. As the publication of the NC Museum of Art says: "Now the painter could work anywhere on the painting's surface at any time...This was absolutely crucial with the Impressionists. They needed to work very quickly to capture fleeting effects of light and weather. This required an intuitive immediate response which could not be limited to one small part of a larger composition."
Here are two paintings by Claude Monet, one of the great Impressionists. Can you imagine painting either one of these if you had to paint all of your blues first, then all of your reds, etc? Impossible!
Working all over the canvas simultaneously, as you can see in the above images, is a hallmark of the Impressionists. Camille Pissarro advised "Don't paint bit by bit, but paint everything at once by placing tones everywhere." In my own practice, going back and forth between different areas of the canvas is essential to getting the color relationships right. Every color affects the others, especially those close to it, and I cannot imagine how hard it would be to get the relationships right if you had to paint each color, one by one, in its totality. So here's to the humble paint tube!
Why was the paint tube revolutionary? Two reasons: (1) it let you re-seal paint to keep it fresh, and (2) it let you take the paint outside the studio and work en plein air. For today, I am going to focus on #1.
Re-sealing the paint was a huge development, because oil paints start to dry out and harden as soon as they are exposed to air. Once exposed to air, paint will only stay useable for a day or two at most. Before the mid-1800's, artists stored their paint in pigs' bladders to
avoid exposing it to the air. The bladders were notoriously messy, and tended to burst. They were opened by piercing with a tack. Once opened, they could not be resealed.
All of that changed with the advent of the metal paint tube. And we owe it to a fellow Carolinian--John G. Rand, from South Carolina--who patented it in 1841. The metal of the tube was impermeable, and with the screw-on lid it would stay airtight. You could open and close the tube as often as you wished, without the paint spoiling.
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| Pig's Bladder with Paint |
With this new invention, paint would last almost indefinitely. Before the tube, when an artist opened a bladder of paint, he needed to use it all before it spoiled. Thus, painters of old would paint all of the blue areas of a painting when they opened the bladder of blue--needing to finish before the paint oxidized. Then they would move on to the next color, and do the same.
With the advent of the tube, painters could open all of their pigments at once. No more worry about wasting paint--the right quantity could be squeezed from the tube, and the tube could be resealed to preserve the rest. As the publication of the NC Museum of Art says: "Now the painter could work anywhere on the painting's surface at any time...This was absolutely crucial with the Impressionists. They needed to work very quickly to capture fleeting effects of light and weather. This required an intuitive immediate response which could not be limited to one small part of a larger composition."
Here are two paintings by Claude Monet, one of the great Impressionists. Can you imagine painting either one of these if you had to paint all of your blues first, then all of your reds, etc? Impossible!
Monet: "Les Tilleuls a Poissy"
Monet: "Le Grand Canal"
Working all over the canvas simultaneously, as you can see in the above images, is a hallmark of the Impressionists. Camille Pissarro advised "Don't paint bit by bit, but paint everything at once by placing tones everywhere." In my own practice, going back and forth between different areas of the canvas is essential to getting the color relationships right. Every color affects the others, especially those close to it, and I cannot imagine how hard it would be to get the relationships right if you had to paint each color, one by one, in its totality. So here's to the humble paint tube!
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