Why I Chose to Paint in Oils

When people see my landscape paintings, they sometimes ask why I chose to work in oils.

The simple answer is that oil gives me time.

I have never been interested in painting a landscape exactly as I see it. Most of my work begins with a real place — somewhere I have travelled, walked, stopped for a moment, or wanted to remember. But when I return to the studio, I am no longer trying to copy what was in front of me.

I am trying to paint what stayed with me.

A certain light.
The feeling of wind near the water.
A line of birds disappearing into the distance.
The colour of a cliff that was probably different in reality, but somehow became warmer or quieter in my memory.

Oil paint allows me to stay with those memories for a little longer.

I like that a painting can change while I am making it

One of the things I love most about oils is that they don't force me to make every decision immediately.

The paint stays workable. I can soften an edge, remove something, move a shape, change a colour or completely rethink an area of the painting.

Very often, the painting I start is not the painting I finish.

I might begin with photographs and a fairly clear idea of the composition, but somewhere during the process the work starts moving in another direction. A sky becomes larger. A coastline becomes simpler. Birds appear where I hadn't planned them. Colours become less realistic and more connected to the feeling I remember.

I like having that freedom.

For me, painting is partly about responding to what is happening on the canvas rather than following a perfect plan.

Depth matters to me

There is also something about the physical quality of oil paint that I have always been drawn to.

Some areas of my paintings are very soft and thin. Others have visible brushstrokes, layers and texture. When light moves across the surface, those differences become part of the work.

I love that a painting can look quiet from across the room and reveal much more when you come closer.

A small brushstroke.

A change in colour.

A layer underneath another layer.

The evidence that someone actually stood in front of the canvas and made it by hand.

That physical presence is important to me.

Oil paint matches the way I remember places

When I travel, I take photographs, but photographs are never the whole story.

Places stay with me in fragments.

The temperature. The scale of a cliff when you are standing below it. The sound of hundreds of birds. The colour of the water just before the weather changes. Sometimes even a completely ordinary detail becomes the thing I remember most.

Back in my studio, these fragments start coming together.

Oil paint lets me build a landscape slowly in much the same way — layer after layer, changing and adjusting until the painting begins to feel like the memory rather than simply resemble the photograph.

I think this is one of the main reasons the medium feels so natural to me.

I also love the slowness of it

Oil painting is not particularly convenient.

Paintings take time. Layers need time. Sometimes I work on something for hours only to come back the next morning and realize that an entire section needs to change.

But I have come to appreciate that slowness.

So much of life happens quickly. We photograph something, scroll past something, move on to the next thing.

Painting asks me to do the opposite.

To stay.

To look again.

To notice a colour I hadn't noticed before. To decide whether one tiny shape belongs in the painting or not. To spend days with a landscape that I may have experienced for only a few hours in real life.

There is something very grounding about that process.

Maybe that is what I am really painting

Over time, I have realized that I am not only painting landscapes.

I am painting the experience of paying attention to them.

That is probably why oil became my medium.

It gives me enough time to change my mind, enough depth to build a world slowly, and enough freedom to let memory become part of what I see.