Oil paintings

Out of all Universal Art, most pictorial works are oil paintings. Whether over metal, wood, stone, or as it’s most commonly presented on canvas or boards, oil painting will always be synonymous of elegance and distinction, and it’s certainly a wise choice if we’re thinking of purchasing an original piece.

Vividness and durability

Oil paintings were a revolution in the world of art, as these rich and living pigments usually coming from natural elements, mainly metals and precious stones, provided paint-works an excellent stability and color conservation. Flanders painters were who used oil painting for the first time. With this technique, in addition, corrections during the execution of the work were easier due to the painting’s slow drying.

This Art, existing since the Middle Ages and which invention is falsely attributed to the Flemish painter Jan Van Eyck, basically consists in changing the binder that was previously used which was plaster for a base like linseed oil, to which then is also added turpentine so the formula can dry. In this way, oil paintings could preserve the oil’s brightness and dry under shade, which prevented them from cracking.

The evolution of the technique

Something also allowed by this technique, due to its formula density, is working with relief and texture experimentation. In the impressionist and post-impressionist period, this concept was brought to the maximum expression in oil painting. Authors such as Van Gogh loaded their paintings with this type of painting to provide them greater relief.

In these artistic trends, besides, textures were masterly achieved, to the point of some of Renoir’s paintings, in which the texture of the clothes or the background of the painting has a much greater pictorial interest than the people portrayed in them. The shapes in these oil paintings were made through individual brushings with great color vividness, which once observed near didn’t establish a clear representation, buy from afar these acquired all their meaning.

The artist´s most elaborate expression

One of the bases of oil painting is the separation of pictorial colors and those that we perceive with our brain and later idealize. Although the color of the sky is perceived blue, in an oil painting a sky completely blue will be much brighter and more colorful than the sky itself. Deconstructing these concepts and reinterpreting them is something that the great painting masters have developed in many different ways.

Due to the inherent complexity in the mastery of this pictorial technique, oil paintings represent the total realization of the artist and their most complex expression. Oil painting is also synonymous of distinction and good taste in all its formats.

Visit our online art gallery to discover the magnificent oil paintings we propose.

Jorge Sanchez