Becoming a Painter: Danni Lin's Journey
Danni Lin describes how she became a painter. Read on to learn about the influence of their artist grandmother, his attempts to replicate a Lucien Freud, and her discovery of painting as alchemy.
Danni is teaching The Literal Blocks of Oil Painting and Achieving Skin Tone Realness with us this summer.
Danni Lin pictured with her large scale painting, Shanghai, hong kong, egg fu yung, fortune cookie always wrong. Image credit: Danni Lin
Image Description: The artist Danni Lin poses with her large scale oil painting, which hangs off the wall and wraps onto the floor.
My grandma was an oil painter. I grew up watching her paint. Her house was a salon dedicated to her painting practice. The walls were packed with her paintings of flowers, ocean landscapes, and clowns copied from old calendars and postcards. Her paintings were tight and controlled, betraying her devotion to the source material. As far as I know, she never attempted an original composition beyond changing the color scheme to include more of her favorite yellows and peaches. Her favorite art movement was Impressionism, but she couldn’t allow herself the same freedom of expression in her own work. As a young child she explained to me how her goal was to “loosen up.” This was my first clue in learning how to paint. I looked between her paintings and the paintings she wished to emulate and saw the discrepancy. Because of this, I learned early on to pay special attention to the movement of paint on a canvas.
In her designated ‘painting zone’ just off the kitchen, she kept a collection of tiny glass bottles with handwritten labels: an oil to make the paint last, an oil to resist yellowing, some to help paint dry faster or glossier or flatter, and countless others I never learned the uses for. If you’ve ever seen the appeal in collecting vintage perfume bottles, you may understand my deep fascination with these mysterious concoctions. It was my grandma who first taught me about turpentine and linseed oil. She showed me how to use carbon paper to transfer a pencil sketch to the canvas and how to seal it so the graphite wouldn’t get mixed in with the paint. She taught me to start with a yellow ochre underpainting and showed me her palette (a classic Impressionist palette, of course). She kept her wet paint in an old film reel case to keep it fresh.
I was very young when I made my first oil painting. My grandma sat me down with a blank canvas and a photo depicting a field of flowers and we got to work. I worked on it day after day, and when I went to bed she would continue to work on it for me. Because of this, I would often wake up impressed with - it was turning out well. To this day I will leave the studio unsatisfied and come to the painting the next day, loving it more just by the virtue of it existing overnight. The main thing she tried to impress on me was to put paint on my brush. I thought, 'of course I have to put paint on my brush!' But she would continue reminding me this; like a mantra.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU, Danni Lin. Image credit: Danni Lin.
Image Description: A painting of a thin white, lightly wrinkled surface with delicate outlines of figures and motifs in red.
It was in one of my freshman classes at the San Francisco Art Institute that I first got the assignment to copy a painting. At the time I was all about skin, so I chose the painting Benefits Supervisor Resting by Lucian Freud. I liked the colors, the way he built up the model’s curves, and how relaxed the model looked. But more than anything else, I liked the Paint itself. I wanted my paintings to have that same depth and complexity. This was an impossible task.
I had started my copy way too small. Reference photos are just lies about paintings. I didn’t have time (reproduction painting is no joke), and I didn’t put enough paint on my brush. Some lessons I never stop learning.
I gave up on the project after a few weeks. My biggest mistake was my assumption that the original painting was ‘relaxed’.
It was not until I was able to see this painting in person that I caught my own mistake. The initial shock of Benefits Supervisor Resting was its dominating weight and size. I was flooded with excitement and realization. My eyes were captured by the movement of the lush layers of paint. I was trying to dig deep into the web of infinite micro-decisions, made simultaneously by both subject and artist, that led to the culmination of this painting. This was in no way ‘relaxed.’ I was overwhelmed by information and looked to the placard for a starting point in constructing my narrative. This narrative was my point of access into understanding why this painting held me so entranced.
It would be unreasonable to assume that this model just wandered into the artist’s studio, fell asleep nude, and got discovered by a very quiet and fast working artist who felt inspired to capture her in this moment of unguarded rest. In fact this model was Sue Tilley, a 30-year old-woman who worked as a supervisor at a government job center in London. She spent her off hours entrenched in the 1980's anarchist club scene and met Freud through the artist Leigh Bowery. She did not just wander in and fall asleep.
Tilley adhered to a gruesome schedule, coming to Freud's studio and holding a pose for 4-5 hour sessions, 4-5 days a week, for almost a year. She held her space while he rigorously layered paint. In the painting, Tilley appears calm, confident, and in control of both the artist and the viewer. I wanted to know what she might have felt during these extensive sessions. I laid back in this position and immediately felt how this pose would eventually make my back and neck ache and how quickly my legs would have fallen asleep. This is a painting about endurance.
I committed to looking at it longer and began to notice details in the paint itself. I worked on My assignment (only took a couple of) for only a few weeks, but Freud had taken significantly longer. As a viewer, I was offered entrance into Freud's dissecting gaze. I saw his focused attention where the brushstrokes are heaviest, the most dynamic, and feel the most intentional. I followed the patterns in the colors until I could envision Freud’s hand moving decidedly around the canvas. I noticed peaks and valleys in the texture of the paint and imagined how long it took him to sculpt these specific blobs of paint. It must have been messy in his studio because painting with a lot of paint on your brush inevitably means you have to wipe a lot of paint off your brush. I looked for proof of my theory in the environment surrounding Tilly, in the details the artist included of his studio. I found the imprint of a lost hair that was either carefully removed with a pair of tweezers or fell off the paint naturally. The longer I looked, the more I saw. This is a painting about obsession. What compelled me to spend time with this painting was the intimate connection I was able to make with it; I’d have undoubtedly learned more if I’d spent more time on my reproduction.
In my final semester of college I took a class titled “The Chemistry of Oil Painting.” I was reaching the end of my formal training and realized that I had barely begun to understand the never-ending list of techniques oil painters use. My hope was to cover some ground in the nitty-gritty materiality of it all. I wanted to learn the difference between cold pressed and refined linseed oil. Whether or not turpentine is better than turpenoid. How to use oil ground to prime a canvas. How to mix my own paint from pigment, the role of resins in mixing mediums, the benefits of bristle or hog hair brushes. I wanted to know why Caravaggio’s paintings shone with an inner light that I could never manage to replicate (it’s because he allegedly primed his canvases with silver, or possibly it’s the lead). When I arrived on the first day of the course, I realized that it was, more or less, a beginner’s oil painting class. Although I was about to graduate, I stuck with it.
My teacher and I had very different ideas about what we were here to learn. When he demonstrated his glazing technique on pre pre-stretched, acrylic-primed canvas using nothing but linseed oil and gamsol, I almost lost it. I was past these basics. I wanted to know the historical stuff, the weird stuff, the CHEMISTRY stuff! While other students worked away, I barraged him with questions. It was beyond frustrating that, for many of them, he didn’t have the answers. He would laugh at me as he watched me struggle with a hot pot of stinking rabbit skin glue. He assigned a reading that compared painting to alchemy. I spent half a class arguing with him over it. I couldn’t accept the idea that painting had anything to do with fake science; I wanted to know the real science. I felt that chemistry was the secret being kept by all great artists and I wanted to know it.
Cho Chang in Chinatown (Stairway to Heaven), by Danni Lin. Oil on paper, 48’’ x 84’’. 2015. Photo credit: Danni Lin
Image Description: A large painting on a large sheet of paper that curls into a scroll at the top and bottom, depicting dogs and children flying around space on a peach and in a rocket ship beneath clouds that hold up a street scene and a large rainbow.
I hadn’t yet put the full equation together. As artists, we spend countless hours in the studio turning rocks and fluids into paintings. The specific steps in making a painting could never be accurately measured, let alone replicated. I will never be Lucien Freud (thankfully). Art depends on a substance no formula can describe. It’s in the smell, the feeling, the presence. Suddenly my teacher made a lot more sense. Chemistry is only a small part of it. I could learn every technique available and it wouldn’t make my art any more mesmerizing. I wanted my art to communicate something more. I wanted it to be a source of human connection and a pathway to understanding something greater than itself. I wanted it to resonate the way my favorite art resonates. This is what my teachers understood and what I had unknowingly been attempting to erase from my work by trying to imitate Freud. What makes my work intrinsically different from my grandma’s and Freud’s is the undeniable fact that it was made by me. The touch of my hand combined with every other factor constitutes what makes up my style. To an artist, a picture is the sum of conceptualization as well as process. It is the result of breathing fumes, wiping brushes, dripping oils, pushing paint around, wiping, scraping, diluting, mixing, sketching, thinking, processing, and time passing.
This is the secret: that art is simultaneously clear and unclear. An oil painting is a chance to experience untranslatability. In the words of my mentor, it is “communication as a friable ball of dirt/dust being tossed from one person to another.” This is the allure of painting and the reason it persists despite being pronounced dead in the 70s. This is what must be brought to the table to make an oil painting. The learning never ends. My teacher laughed at me as I struggled to fit a lifetime of research into a single semester. Painting is like alchemy, not because it’s fake science, but rather because it’s not science at all. It’s not something that can be taught, but must be discovered. I could never be a chemist. I am an artist. A great oil painting can be achieved with nothing but linseed oil and gamsol if you put paint on your brush. Everything else, I can help you learn in my class: The Literal Building Blocks of Oil Painting.
Shanghai, Hong Kong, Egg Fu Young, Fortune Cookie Always Wrong! by Danni Lin. Mixed Media, 84x216" 2019. Photo credit: Danni Lin
Image Description: A large painting that hangs on the wall and wraps around to the floor. The painting depicts faces, cartoon characters, cut outs cartoon faces, an interior scene, a large black space where the painting transitions from floor to wall, and two pairs of physical shoes that rest on the two corners on the floor.
About Danni:
Danni Lin (b.1992) is technically a multimedia artist but maintains that it’s all painting. They have shown in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Shanghai all at galleries that have since ceased to exist. Within a style “towards realism” her work is largely focused on identity, ambiguity, and being emo. He also has an Art History Podcast with more than 40 listeners.