Whipping up a masterpiece: painters and their materials

If you are someone who revels in the deliciousness of oil paintings, who looks at them and wants to eat them ‘as if they were ice cream or something’, in Damien Hirst’s phrase, then Martin Gayford’s latest book will be a banquet. In part, this is thanks to the illustrations – luscious close-ups of Van Gogh’s brushstrokes like buttercream icing, and a double-page spread of a golden Rothko large enough to tumble into. But mainly it’s due to his intention to understand the medium of painting from the inside out: from the artists’ viewpoint rather than the art historian’s. He is well placed to do this, having interviewed almost every well-known artist (many of them for this magazine) during his past 30 years as a critic. From these conversations, as well as his studies of earlier artists, he gives us this deeply absorbing and original account, far removed from most conventional art history.

He begins briskly, dismissing the usual schools, movements and so on: ‘Rather than constantly evolving towards some further state, painting in all its crucial aspects has remained exactly the same as it ever was.’ An artist today who has chosen the medium of paint is in many ways faced with the same dilemmas as any painter stretching back through the millennia: what surface to choose? What tool – brush or palette knife, squeegee, bucket or automatic paint-squirter? What paint, and how to mix it to the right consistency? One irresistible detail among many is the information that Rembrandt, who had dozens of recipes for mixing paint, developed a method of emulsifying egg, oil and pigment into soft globules that held their shape: that is, 100 years before the Duc de Richelieu’s chef, Rembrandt invented mayonnaise, and used it to paint with.