Much can be said about white in oil painting. By far it is the paint that is most sold. I am also a bulk consumer.Together with Yellow Ocher, it is the paint that I use the most.
Since I have been browsing every now and then the beautiful book The Art Spirit by Robert Henri, I come across the most beautiful passages that I must remember. I keep my ear to the ground reading these pages.
Like this text that I replicate in its entirety, about white in oil painting.
About white in oil painting
“In the painting of light, in modeling form, keep as deep down in colour as you can. It is the colour that makes the sensation of light. Play from warm to cold, not from white to black.
The tendency to put in more white is so usual that it would be well to restrict the white. Keep it off the palette. Allow only so much of it in the pigments which must have it,and allow the much less than you think they should have. A set palette may look quite impossible for its want of white in comparison with the subject before you. It certainly is, any paint is, if you expect to reproduce the thing in nature.But your work is not, and cannot be, a reproduction. Nature has its laws. Your pigments and your flat canvas have other laws.
You must work within the laws of your material.
Pictures which are overcharged with white paint look whiter but they do not have the look of white.”
Amen to that! Very wise words which I shall keep in mind.
Thanks for posting, Ben!
The Art Spirit is indeed a “must read” for all portrait painters. I came across it through an interview with Everett Raymond Kinstler who thinks ” it is the best book ever written about painting”.
I think your method of drawing very hetfull