artists' tools

FrankS

FrankS

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i've often read that some photographers are too obsessed with their gear, and that painters do not waste their time discussing and fussing about their tools. but isn't true that there are super premium quality brushes and paints that are sold for exorbitant prices? would not these represent/ be analogous to leicas? surely they do not make a better painting. thoughts?
 
I think like photographers, there are hobbist painters and 'professional' painters. My uncle is a hobbist painter who studied under some quite famous Chinese watercolour painters. I bought him some quite expensive sable brushes for Christmas a few years ago and he said that his mentor would scold him for using such expensive brushes. It was an off the cuff comment but when we spoke about it later, he mentioned that given his still amateur brush techniques the fancy sable brushes were wasted on him. My uncle, was at the time focused on mastering composition, colours and basic brush techniques.

People choose their tools for many reasons, some use expensive, beautiful tools because they want to and can afford them, not necessarily because they need it to achieve something when lesser tools would suffice.

I suspect that some painters, like photographers spend as much or more time thinking/talking/discussing their tools as they do the product of their tools and for others, the focus of their discourse is focused on the product of their efforts.
 
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That good tools are essential to good work is a given. Because good is often equated with expensive, it is likely that affluent amateur painters use the brushes of which you speak, not those who paint for a living. This could be true of cameras also. I have known many good photographers. They chose their equipment with care and they cared for it well: but they did not obsess over it.
 
Better tools are often more pleasant to use, and sometimes deliver better quality: obviously there's a difference between nylon-bristle brushes and sable. How much difference you can detect, or how much difference it will make to the results, varies from person to person.

But put it this way: I have never regretted buying better tools, e.g. Craftsman or Snap-On spanners (wrenches) etc., versus Chinese putty-metal.

Same for cameras, really.

Cheers,

R.
 
I have a fine arts degree from Indiana University. Art students there, as at most art schools, have to take classes in all the different kinds of art, not just the thing they major in (photography for me, of course). The painting classes were taught by three nationally famous artists who were represented by galleries in New York and who regularly sold paintings for $5000-$15,000 each. They all insisted on using the best paints, brushes, and substrates (canvas, paper, wood panels, etc). We were forbidden to use inexpensive "Student Grade" paints. When one student complained of the cost, the professor told her that she was here to become a professional artist, which meant using materials that were good enough to sell to people who were paying thousands of dollars. Then he took one of the student's tubes of cheap oil paint and one of his tubes of Old Holland paint (an expensive professional's oil paint that has been made since the 1600's). He squeezed out aa little paint from each on his palette and then painted a streak of each paint (they were the same color) on his canvas he was using for demonstration. The difference was incredible, the cheap paint was dull and lifeless.

Professional's DO care about materials in the world of painting. It shows the ignorance of most photographers that they keep repeating such silly and untrue platitudes about the relationship between artists and their materials and equipment. Gear does matter. Materials matter. They always have, for photographers, painters, sculptors...

Of course the best materials and equipment will not make a bad photographer good, but bad equipment and materials will lower the quality of images that a great photographer will produce.
 
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I want to add that painters brushes matter too. Less so in oil painting than in watercolor, but they do matter. Cheap brushes make it hard to control the paint precisely. The Windsor-Newton Series 7 brush that someone else showed is one of the very best watercolor brushes; they're hand made with each hair selected from the sable pelt individually. They are very expensive and can cost a couple hundred each for larger ones. I own one and only one as it was all I could afford, and it made watercolor painting much easier.
 
It depends on the style. The impressionists needed really high quality, pure colors. Jackson Pollock used automotive lacquer and house paint. In a current show at the Art Institute of Chicago, the artist, James Castle, used spit and soot to make his drawings. Most of Caravaggio's late paintings were made with a very limited palette, just white, red, and earth tones.

With a nice camera, even if your pictures are no good, you can always just look at the camera.
 
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My mother was a painter for most of her life. On those occasions when I offered to pick up supplies for her, she was quite specific about oils, brushess, and stretched canvas to buy. We rarely talked shop (I didn't ask her about why she chose certain oils or watercolors, and I she didn't ask me about what I had against "color print film" at the time [late '80s-early '90s), and she didn't go on about this stuff at all otherwise, but she knew what she wanted.

I've tried to more or less follow her example. But sometimes I can't keep my silly trap shut. 😉


- Barrett
 
Melvin said:
It depends on the style. The impressionists needed really high quality, pure colors. Jackson Pollock used automotive lacquer and house paint. In a current show at the Art Institute of Chicago, the artist, James Castle, used spit and soot to make his drawings. Most of Caravaggio's late paintings were made with a very limited palette, just white, red, and earth tones.

With a nice camera, even if your pictures are no good, you can always just look at the camera.
Click to expand...

that is brilliant! 🙂
 
Some of us cried when DuPont went out of the sensitized products business altogether. They were the originators of variable contrast papers with Varigam. They introduced a new set of filters when Varilour came out a decade or so later. The new filters incorporaed some neutral density so exposure remained constant when you changed contrast, but both sets of filters would work with either paper. Or all the other brands, for that matter!

They were the first company to introduce papers incorporating brighteners so the whites would have the intensity of the silver rich blacks. Varilour BTW was a paper not since equaled.
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
Professional's DO care about materials [in the world of painting]. It shows the ignorance of most photographers that they keep repeating such silly and untrue platitudes about the relationship between artists and their materials and equipment. Gear does matter. Materials matter. They always have, for photographers, painters, sculptors...
Click to expand...

I would have deleted the stuff in brackets, and added "chef/baker" to your list... and I think I might be tempted to repeat the 'ignorance' thought again, but that might be taken as somewhat redundantly offensive.
 
Al Kaplan said:
Some of us cried when DuPont went out of the sensitized products business altogether. They were the originators of variable contrast papers with Varigam. They introduced a new set of filters when Varilour came out a decade or so later. The new filters incorporated some neutral density so exposure remained constant when you changed contrast, but both sets of filters would work with either paper. Or all the other brands, for that matter!

They were the first company to introduce papers incorporating brighteners so the whites would have the intensity of the silver rich blacks. Varilour BTW was a paper not since equaled.
Click to expand...

Sorry, Al, they weren't: this is a persistent myth. VC paper is an Ilford invention: check the patents and orginal announcements. Du Pont were the first to get the paper to market, because Ilford announced it on the eve of World War Two, but they used Ilford dyes and patents made available to them on the basis of personal friendship between senior people at the two companies: Ilford weren't worried as they didn't export to the United States in the 1930s.

Cheers,

R.
 
What a funny discussion. It is so "boomer-ish" in its sense of the "best" as seen from the view of middle class folk.

Artists from the cave painters on have always used the material on hand. The photographers who traipse across the American continent used lenses and processes that are primitive by current standards.

I work with lots of artists and all seem to have their own favorite materials, paints and brushes.

I love Leicas but you can certainly make great pictures with a lot simpler camera and lenes. On that score and more recently Duane Michels comes to mind. He shot his book "Sequences" with an Argus C3.

Its never the tool but the hand and eye that uses it.

Hawkeye
 
hawkeye said:
What a funny discussion. It is so "boomer-ish" in its sense of the "best" as seen from the view of middle class folk.

Artists from the cave painters on have always used the material on hand. The photographers who traipse across the American continent used lenses and processes that are primitive by current standards.

I work with lots of artists and all seem to have their own favorite materials, paints and brushes.

I love Leicas but you can certainly make great pictures with a lot simpler camera and lenes. On that score and more recently Duane Michels comes to mind. He shot his book "Sequences" with an Argus C3.

Its never the tool but the hand and eye that uses it

Hawkeye
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Twaddle, sorry, cave painters valued their tools too, one of man's oldest artefacts is a piece of red ochre ... and it's decorated, therefore the artist valued it, no?


 
Stewart,

Whoa. How did you get so many assumptions into one little artifact. We do not even know what the purpose of the cave paintings were but you are certain that the object is a decorated tool that you have decided must mean it has value.

The painters lived some 30,000 years ago and we can hardly be sure of much about their lives--especially their motives.

And look even assuming that this is a tool and is valued it certainly does not relate to the discussion of the "best" tools. For all we know this was maybe the cave painters only tool.

And the next cave over the painter there may have had a much better piece of ochre.

Hawkeye
 
Keith, tie me camel hairs down, mate.

I have a debt of gratitude to Harris, because my (incredibly popular ... not quite) 70s acid rock band, the Electric Hooka featured tuned masonite wobble boards.
 
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