acrylic paint and oil paint -- 5/21/2026

21 May 2026

acrylic paint and oil paint -- 5/21/2026

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Today's encore selection -- from Thinking About Art by Penny Huntsman. Though they had been around for centuries, oil paints gained prominence and popularity with the masterful works of Jan van Eyck in the 15th century. Acrylic paints emerged as a potential alternative to oil paints for artists in the 1950s:

“Acrylic paint was first used in the 1940s and made commercially available in the 1950s and while it is assumed to have greater durability than oil and a reduced tendency to discolour, its permanency is yet to be tested. Acrylic also dries much faster than oil, and so is less suited to images that require modelling or chiaroscuro. Acrylic paint, which uses an acrylic polymer emulsion as a binder, dries to a flexible paint film because it is comprised of interlocking molecules which shift without causing damage during expansion and contraction. While oil paint is referred to as 'oil-based' on account of its mix with linseed oil, acrylic is referred to as water-based on account of its dilution with water, if desired, although it is most commonly applied thickly to give an opaque finish.

“Acrylic is also quite flat in terms of its light absorption which can render its subject fairly stark in contrast to the light-reflective qualities of oil. Consider Vermeer's View of Delft, 1660-1661, for example; if this work had been executed in acrylic, then the atmosphere, the reflected sparkle, and the richness would all be lost. The Prussian Blue that Van Gogh described as 'heavenly' in the View of Delft, is not even possible in acrylic on account of a chemical incompatibility (De Leeuw, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, p. 401). Vermeer's renowned depiction of sunlight in some works, and the 'spiritual' glow in others, was achievable through his use of Indian Yellow, an oil paint made from the urine of cows fed upon mango leaves. Conversely, as liberating as the medium of oil was for artists like Vermeer, the acrylic paints exploited in Ofili's contemporary works (examined later in this chapter) are not available in oils. Every material brings its own range of possibilities and limitations.

“Oil paintings are prone to cracking over time, while acrylic paintings maintain a stable surface. This is because the binders (liquids mixed with the pigment) in oil and acrylic paint are different. Oil paint binders, such as linseed oil, dry to an inflexible, weak film that may crack as it expands and contracts with changes in external temperature.

“Young British Artist (YBA) Marcus Harvey (born 1963) uses the medium of acrylic in a similar way to that of Hockney insofar as he shows an awareness of the limitations of the medium and uses the graphic properties of acrylic to lend a further dimension of meaning to his painting of child murderer Myra Hindley. How do you think the qualities of acrylic help to convey a sense of Hindley's character?

Myra by Marcus Harvey (1995)

"Harvey's large-scale portrait Myra uses acrylic with a hand-printing technique to create a mosaic effect, which, when seen from a distance, is reminiscent of her black and white police mug-shot on which the painted image is based. That Harvey used the plaster cast of a child's hand to print the portrait catapults an already emotive image to new levels of explosive controversy. Primary school children, innocent and untutored, make perhaps their first personalised creations like this, only usually they adorn our kitchen walls and later become memories in parents' scrapbooks. However, Harvey implements an unorthodox technique, causing the handprints to appear pixelated and mechanically detached from us.

“Like so many artists before him, in a lineage that started with Caravaggio (originally Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, 1571-1610) in the seventeenth century, Harvey paints the 'ugly truth': pointing directly to an unspeakable crime. While it has been argued that this work is astonishingly insensitive, others consider that children are too often without a voice in an adult world, and that in noting their tiny handprints, we become poignantly aware of their vulnerability.”