Breaking the rules of painting?

[Michael Fournier]

Michele, I have heard that it is possible to get a bad bottle of Liquin. It has never happened to me but I have heard enough stories from others that I believe it to be true. I used Liquin in almost all of my illustration work.

I have done many oil wash paintings on gessoed panels using Liquin as the medium, since without some added medium thin washes of paint when dry do not have anything to bind the pigment to the surface. So far all my paintings are still ok.

I did learn something when I first started using that technique. Sometimes if the surface had oils (even the oil from your hands was enough) on the gesso the paint would not stick well. I would wash the surface with 409 or some other detergent that cuts grease and then the Liquin and turp-thinned paint would stay very well. You would think since there is oil in the paint this would not matter but it did, at least with the thin layers of paint I was using.

Sometimes that was the only layer giving it the look of a watercolor. Other times I would paint opaque paint over this. More well known artists that use this method are Bart Forbes, Bernie Fuchs and Michael Dudash.

Liquin dries faster than oil paint with no Liquin so you cannot put a layer with a lot of liquin over a layer with none until it is completely dry. Unlike oil-based mediums which slow drying and would be fat compared to oil paint alone, paint with Liquin added is like paint with less oil. So it is not fat but lean paint since it dries faster. You cannot use Liquin like other oil based mediums. This also could have caused your painting to delaminate.

Don't feel bad. Many illustrators do plenty of things you would not do in fine art paintings. Norman Rockwell used shellac as a fixative to isolate his drawing from the paint layers. This is not a great idea since shellac has a naturally waxy coating and the oil paint can delaminate from it.

This had a benefit for his purpose. Turps does not dissolve Shellac (alcohol does) so he could completely wipe his layers of oils off even if they were dry. He could start over and not lose his drawing if he wanted.

Conservators working on preserving his paintings today have to be very careful when they remove the top varnish to clean the painting that they don't disturb the layers of paint as well. Even now the paint can still be removed from the shellac layer if they are not careful.