Park Kwangsoo | The Darkness of White Milk

Oil colours blend smoothly into one another, which lets a painter work with delicate shifts of colour and fine detail in light and shadow. Some pigments, mixed with oil, form transparent or translucent films called glazes; spread over another colour, a glaze alters it without hiding it, and changing the thickness produces gradations of tone and an illusion of relief. At the opposite extreme, paint piled on thickly (impasto) holds the marks of the brush or palette knife, and light crossing the surface catches on them. In modern art, the texture of the paint and the shape of each brushmark came to be treated as capable of carrying feeling. According to the National Gallery in London, oil paint was already in use across northern Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries, on panels and walls alike, and the innovations of painters there reached Italy in the early 15th century. Wood panels had been the usual support, but were heavier and less portable than canvas; the earliest surviving canvases date from the late 14th century. On Korean museum labels, the medium is written 캔버스에 유화 물감, “oil paint on canvas,” as in the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art's list for its Lee Dae-won exhibition. Pace Gallery's text for its Seoul exhibition of Pam Evelyn speaks of vivid oil paint that the artist layers, scrapes, and drips.

Go close to the surface: where is the paint a thin layer that lets the colour below show, and where is it built up so that brush or knife marks stand out?