„How long does it take to dry” sounds like a question with one number, but there are three answers — because an oil painting dries on three different levels and each takes a different time. Confusing them causes most of the damage that is hard to repair later.
It is worth noticing that oil paint does not really „dry” at all. Nothing evaporates from it — the oil binds oxygen from the air and hardens. So nothing that helps with water helps here: no hairdryer, no radiator, no open window on a frosty day.
Most of all on the pigment. Earths — umbers, siennas, ochres — dry fast, because the manganese and iron compounds in them speed up the binding by themselves. Whites, bone blacks, vermilion and some blues dry slowly, sometimes many times slower than their neighbours on the same palette. That is why a single painting never dries evenly.
Then thickness: impasto hardens from the top and can keep a soft centre long after the surface looks finished. Then the binder: more oil means slower and more flexible, more solvent means faster and more brittle. Finally the conditions — moderate warmth, moving air and daylight help; cold and damp double everything.
This is where fat over lean comes from, described at greater length under glazing: every following layer must hold more binder than the one below. A leaner layer over a fatter one dries faster than the ground still working beneath it — and cracks. A net of fine cracks on a painting a few years old almost always means exactly this, and not a fault in the paint.
The practical conclusion is inconvenient: an oil painting is made in stages separated by waiting, not in one run. I deal with it by keeping several canvases going at once — one waits, another moves forward.
These work: driers used sparingly, since too much makes the layer brittle; a resin medium; thin layers instead of one thick one; a warm, airy place. These do not, and can do harm: a hairdryer or a heater, which harden a crust over a soft interior; a closed cupboard, where oxygen runs short; and plain haste.
Three things, all practical. A painting sold as freshly finished may be dry through but not fully cured — you can hang it and look at it, you should not wrap it tightly in plastic or push furniture against it. Varnish goes on only after several months, so its absence on a new work is not a shortcoming but the correct order. And finally: if you commission a work for a particular date, drying time is part of that date — with a large format it can be the larger part of it. Paintings that are finished and waiting are in the oil painting gallery.
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