Studio Notes
The Slowest Colour in the Studio
July 4, 2026
A note on oil glazing, patience, and why some paintings take four months to finish and thirty seconds to read.
Aerosol is instant. Oil is not. Learning to hold both in the same practice has been the hardest technical problem of my career.
Layer one is a lie
The first pass of any glaze looks wrong. Too thin, too cold, too even. It has to. A glaze only becomes a colour once there are six of them stacked, each one fully cured, each one shifting the light slightly deeper.
The waiting
Between layers I go back to the wall. The two practices feed each other — the mural work keeps my hand fast and my composition loose, and the oil work keeps me honest about value and edge.
Speed is a style. Patience is a technique.
Materials I keep coming back to
- Cold-pressed linseed for the early layers
- Marble dust for anything that has to catch a raking light
- A single worn-out two-inch decorator brush that should have been retired years ago