TRICKS AND TECHNIQUE WITH OOPS (OIL ON PAPER SCHOOL)

What if opaque colours can be used to create a play of transparency and translucency in the painting? Since the 14th century, artists have been playing around with various color pigments, binders and solvents to achieve transparency in opaque mineral pigments. These pigments when powdered and pulverized with drying oils such as linseed oil, provides an amazing platform for the artists to work on canvas or pre-treated paper, with an advantage of mixing of colours on the drawing surface and glaze after drying. The paper, briefly introduces artworks of artists made on non-treated and pre-treated paper using oil colours with respect to oil-paper compatibility and preservation of art work. On the similar ground, an opaque blend of oil colours mixed with enamel or polyurethane with other solvents such as turpentine, kerosene and linseed oil, has been explored on art card paper to create some beautiful art works. Thus, demonstrating opacity, transparency and translucency within a single layer of applied paint which has been further explained by application of thin paint on black and white surfaces. In order to bring out such a play of light, various innovative techniques such as, scraping of color by a cloth, a palette knife or a wedge; creation of cells or bubbles and the sponge and rubber roller were used to get the desired effects. The unique effects, achieved through these techniques, have been displayed in various art works by the author, throughout the paper. These techniques when clubbed together with the unconventional enamel mixed oil paints has been named by the author as OOPS (Oil on Paper School). OOPS results in the creation of some extraordinary pieces of art. They bring about the procedure of water colours for getting transparency and opaqueness and at the same time, they impart the property of oil colours (high hue of the pigments and an attractive glossy finish) onto the paper. The paper concludes with a description and the author's perspective of one of his painting from the series ‘Kargil White Again'-1999 (figure 1) with respect to the contextual and formal analysis. This painting is one of his finest pieces of work, where he explored the applications and future of OOPS in creation of some non-conventional art work.