My Watercolor Love

I so often have to answer the question "Why watercolor?", That today I decided to tell everyone about my passion, to close this topic once and for all.

Painting! How many emotions in this simple word! What do you think when you hear it? For sure, the first thought will be "Mona Lisa" - the immortal creation of da Vinci. Then, maybe, I'll remember "Sistine Madonna" Raphael, "Morning in the Pine Forest" Shishkin, "The Birth of Venus" Botticelli, "The Horseman" Bryullov. All these wonderful works are written on a primed canvas with oil. And remember at least one famous watercolor? And in the head not a single thought.

After all, oil is serious and expensive. Such paintings were written for years, but over the years they worked on some for decades. And all these masterpieces were created hundreds of years ago. Cool? Of course, it's cool. And what about watercolor? Fi! Watercolors painted everything from the first class and stamped such a "painting" for one lesson. Children's material, in a word. And anyway, what can there be? A brush dipped in the paint and drove himself on paper, business ...

Meanwhile, not everything is so simple. Paintings written in oil, yes, the same ones that a hundred years ago emerged from under the brushes of eminent maestros, bring restorers so much trouble! Here's the facts for you, judge for yourself.

The terrible secrets of oil canvases

The canvas under the effect of temperature and humidity is deformed, the paint layer crackles (this phenomenon, if one did not know, is called craquelure), and the fungus (porosity) can come into the pores from the back side, from which the base generally collapses.

Many masterpieces were written on old canvases and corresponded many times. Just imagine, layer by layer paint is applied for decades! It's almost a 3D sculpture :)

Especially distinguished Rembrandt. His characters, in the words of one tormented rehabilitator, can be "taken for a nose." And the thicker the layer of oil - the more it breaks. In 70 years the picture needs to be restored, and among the works older than 150 years there is not one, with a whole colorful layer!

Lacquer coating dries faster than paint, and pulls the canvas, forming cracks. All because the oil dries well for a very long time, sometimes up to 3 years. You will not believe, but that very portrait of the "Mona Lisa" is still not dry! A lacquer is required for drying just a month. Do you think all the artists will wait so long? Moreover, the completely dried oil painting is incredibly fragile. The slightest bend of the canvas leads to cracking!

By the way, contemporaries, who work with oil paints, prefer to add a siccative to them. This is a special substance that accelerates drying. Convenience is highly doubtful, because after a few years the paint with this reagent is likely to crack. In addition, the oil with artificial drying loses its elasticity! The picture quickly grows old and grows old. And do we need it?

If these terrible secrets still do not convince you of the difficulty of working with oil, it is because you do not know about the painstaking care that is required of this painting. To preserve the works of great artists, restorers regularly update them. Remove the old, yellowed layer of varnish, remove the craquelure, apply a new one. And all in order that visitors to museums of art could admire these masterpieces.

My favorite watercolor!

Watercolor does not really create all these difficulties. Only there is one nuance - for the work to live the centuries it has laid down, and the paint and the paper itself must be of very high quality.

For example, the paper should be acid-free and slightly glued. Modern technology has long gone from the production of paper on a rag basis. Today, its inexpensive varieties contain a large amount of acid-alkaline residues. Manufactured by the method of deep sizing, such a base under the action of the sun and oxygen turns yellow and collapses.

Continuation here http://kosova-art.ru/mya-akvarelnaya-lyubov