Painting Without Solvents

I’ve been painting long enough, that I sometimes forget that I don’t paint in a traditional way. I am a classically trained oil painter, with an MFA in painting, and I learned all the traditional painting techniques. Somewhere along the way, I started to experiment with different ways of doing things… and then things got weird, but I’ve been doing weird long enough I forget that most people don’t paint this way.

About two semesters into my undergrad, I started researching the health effects of solvents, as well as the problems with disposing of used solvents. My conclusion from both a safety and health aspect was that I didn’t want to use solvents. This started a quest to figure out how to use oil paints without solvents.

This quest to be solvent-free has had such an impact on the development of my painting style. I would not have predicted it when I started the quest.

So how do you paint without solvents?

One option would be to paint with acrylics, but that didn’t work for me. I’ll be covering some of my medium choices at a later date.

I’ve tried oil paint sticks and still use them often. This method works for writing, and small areas, but would be impractical and frustrating for large areas on large paintings.

I’ve tried more natural brush cleaners, but those end up producing odors almost as bad as solvents.

I’ve used rags and paper towels for brush cleaning between colors, and baby oil for cleaning at the end but found this to be wasteful and impractical.

After trial and error, and much experimentation, I found a process that works for me. The answer is that I don’t use brushes almost at all, and I don’t use solvents for thinning paint. I use my hands or palette knives to paint. I sometimes joke that I finger paint, but it does end up a bit more complicated than that! I’ll be writing a future post to go more in-depth as to how this works. Stay tuned…