Paul Oakley is an artist living in Wiltshire who is the Director of Pewsey Vale Studios dedicated to teaching  oil painting within small groups which allows him to give one to one tuition.  

 

He is predominately a landscape artist who also enjoys still life and who is always looking for new ways to paint everyday objects which he so expertly showed us in his demonstration.  He mostly uses oils but his techniques , as he told us, can just as easily be applied to  acrylics. Understanding how paints work and how values change is key to his approach.

 

He began his painting with a coating of thinned down red oxide paint on a chalked gesso’d canvas.  The background area was not a uniform shade or texture using brushstrokes in various directions and pressure.   Paul works with a limited colour palette working dark to light, leaving the warm undercoat showing through for texture.  This, combined with various brush strokes gives a 3D effect to his work. 

 

Key points were – composition,  using a warm undercoat, working dark to light, keeping a looseness to the work, using various brush strokes and saving brighter, thicker pops of colour for the end.

Words; Carole Wooding Photo ,Brenda Burt