We are pleased to share with you the comments and images of the progression of a painting by William Whitaker that is featured in our Essence of the Human Form Exhibition in our Scottsdale gallery.

"I’m particularly proud of this little painting.  It’s stylistically pretty sophisticated and rather different from most contemporary gallery painting.

Until about the mid 1920’s, white lead was the ONLY white paint available to artists. It was the white used by all the Old Masters, the white you see in all the paintings in museums.  It is semi-opaque and as it ages and cures, it becomes both more luminous and more translucent.  If the ground the work is painted on is a brilliant white, the painting will only get better with age.  Many of the Old Masters paintings were executed on toned surfaces – mid grey-brown surfaces.  As the paint on top aged, the white lead contend became more transparent allowing the dark underpainting color to influence the top layers.  Hence, many of the old canvases are considerably darker now than they were when originally finished.  The MONA LISA comes to mind, as do the works of Titian."

My painting will stay bright and will look better and better with age.  William Whitaker, 2015