Book rummage - 8: Oil Painting Step By Step

Here's a book you don't encounter every day. Six quid on eBay right now.

OIL PAINTING STEP BY STEP
by Arnold Fletcher
(Faber, pub 1965, this edition 1970)
The blurb on the jacket tells us that this is a 26-lesson course for newcomers to oil painting, especially the housebound. Nice slim-line hardback edition, with some useful colour charts in. One priceless example is a plate of a 24-colour circle that is essential for the colour-blind painter to ensure he doesn’t paint purple London buses because it marks all the colours with letters like points on the compass. For example YYO is yellow-yellow-orange, and then there’s OOY, which is orange-orange-yellow. BPP is blue-purple-purple. You can guess the rest. Elsewhere, we’re informed that poster colours can be purchased in “small jars for 1 s each”, and “the medium is the solvent that thins out the paint and makes it easy to apply”. This no-nonsense approach to one of art’s most notoriously difficult mediums is applied throughout the 26 lessons, with large, easy to understand lettering, and sturdy yet informative diagrams explaining the techniques behind perspective, colouring, etc. On one page, two blobs of black inexplicably converge and end up splattered across the bottom frame, like a grisly outtake from an early edition of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. “Before you begin to paint,” advises the slightly hectoring author, “let us have a few words about your balance.” And it doesn’t stop there! “How do you make things important?” Mr Fletcher asks. “By getting closer to them, by making them bigger. After all, a bull seven fields away is only an animal, but a bull seven yards away is a thing to be reckoned with.” He’s not wrong, you know. We’d recommend this book to anyone: particularly aspiring oil painters.
Cost: £1.99
Bargain value: 7 (great condition, and a good and useful book)
Cover: 7 (hardback with nice neo-modernist dust jacket)
Author’s authenticity count: 7 (he’s clear and concise)