It’s that time of year when I sit down and put my order together to replenish my supply of paint. I hate to tell nasty little secrets out of school, but it is difficult to get decent art supplies in Italy; at least if you do the kind of painting that I do. The market just doesn’t exist for plein air types or neo-Impressionists.

So I thought it might be useful to respond to the question, what brands and why? And if you read to the very end, I have a great tip for you. I have a sure fire way of keeping the paint on my palette from drying up.

It seems to be the case that with many decent painters, the number of paints (as in colors) one uses diminishes over time. Kevin MacPherson, for example, uses just primary colors – more or less.  He’s not alone. I often envy painters like that. How easy it must be to order paint, not to mention dragging supplies out to the field. However, I am moving in the opposite direction: the more colors and choices the better.

If I were rich, I would hire a number of art sherpa’s to carry around a palette of about 100 colors, all piled up in huge amounts. I would like my palette to look like a gelato stand, a variety of flavors dripping with abundance, inviting, seductive, very nearly begging to be tasted, eaten, consumed. Not only would such a palette look amazing and delicious, there are just so many incredible colors that some manufacturers make that, I believe, cannot possibly be duplicated by mixing primary colors. And as a rich guy I would spare no expense. I would buy brands like Old Holland, Maimeri, or Schmincke Mussini. Old Holland, I think, is the top of the line. Some colors are to die for. Super expensive, too. One of these days I’m going to splurge and just buy about 20 tubes, each a different color, each 150 ml, each goopy as can be, and just have at it. Or maybe not.

What I can afford are Rembrandt and Gamblin. For the money, they are darn good. So I use those two brands primarily. For white I use Classico because I can get it easily in Italy. And white needs to be extra goopy given that I use tons of it, probably 10 times as much as with all the other colors combined.

“Student grade” paint is precisely that; they are for students. Very practical. Very cheap, synthetic and the cobalts and cadmiums (which are the more expensive colors if you buy the real pigments, tend to gray down when mixed.) Synthetic cadmiums and cobalts will say hue as in cadmium orange hue. In this context, hue means fake. But what the heck, they’re super cheap. And you can still make decent paintings with them. And there are many student grade brands, one as good (or as lousy) as the next. Winton, Amsterdam, Daley-Rowney Georgian are examples.

As far as brushes, I use, and will only use, flat filberts rounded tips. Utrecht makes the best inexpensive version of these brushes: 209-F. If you don’t have access to Utrecht, I would suggest going on-line to see what kind of brush I am talking about and then possibly finding it somewhere else.

Okay ladies and gentlemen, you heard the tips. Now for the trick. I am not about to reveal to you the secret of secrets (actually I did hear one student say they had heard of this but only one) and for all you entrepreneurial types out there, this your chance; I only ask that you give me a cut. As you know, if you don’t paint everyday, the paint on your palette dries up. Good-bye expensive paint. This will contribute to you using lesser and lesser amounts and then your paintings will go downhill from there. You’ve heard of the saran wrap trick, the freezing trick, well forget freezing and saran wrap. That’s for amateurs.  Now – drum roll please! – here’s the real trick of tricks: keep your paints underwater. That’s right, you’ve heard it here first – probably.

There are many ways of doing this, of course. One way is to use a plastic (plexi) or glass palette and keep the thing in a tray/kitty litter box, and keep the palette under water. When you want to use the palette, just take it out, shake it off and give it a minute to dry. Or, because I like wood palettes, I use a palette knife to scrape off each color onto a strip of plexi (about 3 inches by 20) and then put the strip of plexi into a tube (PVC with cap) filled with water (or in a tray filled with water). Same thing. When I paint again, I pull out the strip of plexi and transfer the paint to my palette. Always fresh and perky (except for the ultramarine blue – don’t know what’s wrong with ultramarine blue pigments, still usable but not so perky).

So go out and buy the best paints that you can afford. And waste not.