What Is an Oil Painting Study? (And Why I Keep Making Them)
Most of my paintings take a week to two weeks minimum. I'll revisit a section multiple times, let it dry, scrape something down, rebuild it, add detail. That's just the nature of working in oil. But every few weeks I'll set up a small canvas and give myself a single session. I'll spend some time on the underpainting to get the composition down, but after that, no long deliberation. Just the subject and whatever I can find in it, building form with bold brush strokes and moving quickly.
Those are studies. And they're often the most honest (and popular!) work I make.
What an Oil Painting Study Actually Is
The term gets used loosely, but it has a specific history. A study is a focused exploration of a single subject — one figure, one animal, one quality of light — painted quickly and without the obligation of a resolved, finished composition. Artists have been making them forever. Rembrandt used them to understand faces. Velázquez to understand fabric. Sargent to understand almost everything about how light behaves.
The point isn't to make a complete painting. The point is understanding.
That distinction changes everything about how the work gets made. When you free a painting from the pressure of being finished, the marks get more honest. You stop fussing with things that don't matter. The brush goes where the eye goes, and the decisions happen faster than your second-guessing can catch up to them.
How I Build a Study from Scratch
I always start in the dark, as you should too. Ultramarine blue and burnt sienna mixed together make a near-black that's warmer and more alive than anything out of a tube. For a cowboy portrait or a bison in open landscape, that dark goes in first. Loosely, not carefully. Just to establish where the weight of the painting lives and the overall value scale of the painting. Sometimes I pull it warmer with Alizarin crimson. Sometimes cooler with more blue, depending on the light I'm working toward.
Then I build back toward the light. This is counterintuitive for most people. Oil paint rewards thinking in reverse: start where the shadows are and work outward. The lighter layers sit on top of the darks, which is the actual order in which light sits on objects in the world.
The palette knife usually enters around the middle, and sometimes stays a while depending on the reference and overall vibe I am going for. A knife forces you to commit in a way a brush doesn't and creates texture and movement the way a brush cant. You can't noodle with it, you have to just go. When I was painting El Bandito and Last Light, the knife did more work than my brushes did. I think I actually used a palette knife on these pieces for everything besides the underpainting.
Ironically, these were some of the fastest paintings I have ever done, and they sold within a day of posting them.
Those strokes sit up off the canvas with a physical presence that changes depending on where you stand relative to the light. I've written more about how the palette knife changed my whole approach in this earlier post, if you want the longer version.
Why Studies Are Worth Owning
Here's something I've noticed: collectors who buy studies often end up more connected to them than buyers of larger, more polished work. There's a reason for this. Studies don't have the committee-meeting quality that can creep into work revised too many times. They carry the direct mark of a single sustained focus.
Small scale helps. A 10" x 8" oil on canvas is intimate in a way that a large landscape can't be. You can see the individual knife marks. The paint texture catches light from across the room. The whole thing fits in your hands.
The Cowboy Study came out of exactly this kind of session: one figure, one afternoon, earth tones and a few touches of deep crimson. I wasn't trying to make a statement. I was trying to understand a face. The painting did the rest.
That's the thing about studies. The best ones feel like they just poured out of you, because often times, they did! You set the conditions, you stay out of the way, and at the end there's something true on the canvas that didn't exist four hours before. I've never stopped finding that remarkable.
The full series lives in the originals collection if you want to see where this process goes.