GVW LEWIS
Double Actioner
I just checked him out,
here are some links:- Steve Gibson Official Website (https://www.airoilandlead.com/);
- Short Interview during Open Workshop;
- Short video - Gibson at work;
- Hybrid Technique by artist Vic Harris (change the cog-wheel settings speed to 0.25), below I add some comments.
And it would be equally interesting for me, from a traditional oil painting method, to discover how Gibson manipulates his oil paint, to get it fluid enough to put through the airbrush. I am saying this because there is catch 22 here:
- If thinning with turpentine to get oils to milk viscosity, the oil binding properties would be compromised; thus
- Thinning with a "safe" solution made up of linseed oil (refined or stand) or walnut oil (refined or sun-thickened), plus a some varnish such as Dammar, plus Turpentine, does work in traditional methods, but I suspect it would be too sticky to pass through an airbrush, even if in a milk consistency.
I did find an interesting hybrid technique, marrying together airbrush and brush methods: The video from Vic Harris, who utilises this hybrid system. The principles are the same, though. All values relationships in the image are resolved during the grisaille. Colours are then applied, transparent pigments, working from the darkest values through to the more opaque colours in the lightest values. The lighter the values the less transparent and therefore the more opaque, due to the gradual admixture of Whites, which are semi-transparent (Zinc) or fully opaque (Titanium and Lead Whites, Lead Flake and Lead Cremnitz in oil colour nomenclature). The method is hundreds of years old, from Titian (d. Venice in 1576), to Rubens (d. Antwerp in 1640), Caravaggio (d. in Porto Ecole in 1610) and 19th C. Romantics such as William Bouguereau (d. 1905 in La Rochelle). They all and many more, used this technique in one form or another.
The picture below shows a painting by Titian side-by-side with an X-Ray of it done by the National Gallery, I believe:
I thought Vic Harris method is very interesting. He airbrushes a detailed grisaille in acrylics, then switches to traditional brush in oils to bring colour. His video is just over 4 minutes, so it runs at high speed which is a pain in the posterior! I reduced the speed to 0.25 to capture more and noticed Harris uses small brushes, a round number 3 and 4 I think, then goes back with a dry round number 8 or 10 for dry blending the values. The result is more "painterly" to use a term common to oil painters, meaning it is not fully smooth and will show some brush marks. That is okay because it avoids the foggy effect sometimes seen in airbrush painting.
Vic Harris technique has very good results, here is a self-portrait:
But this is where I come back to Steve Gibson and feel intrigued by his method. He uses only airbrush and his paintings retain that "painterly" vivid and vibrant look. This is Gibson's Self Portrait, which shows exactly that, I think. And I am bamboozled at how Gibson manages to get this "painterly" vibrancy with an airbrush alone
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