We're Still Here! | Just Paint

Throughout the COVID-19 outbreak, we are dedicated to our service and continue to be available to answer questions and lend support for artists. We are still here; we are still available; we have just changed the environment in which we work.

My name is Stacy Brock and I am the Supervisor of GOLDEN’s Materials and Applications Department. Our team is comprised of seven highly trained Art Materials Specialists who are all painters and are unique individuals with the commonality that we love to learn and we obsess about art materials and the science behind them. We spend as much time testing, teaching, and researching as we do answering questions from a pool of fantastic creative people who make art. We consider your questions, input and feedback as a gift.

Since everyone on the team is a professional painter, we are using our home studios instead of our shared one on the GOLDEN campus. Please do continue to call us at 607-847-6154/800-959-6543 or email us at [email protected] if you have any questions about artist materials. We are so happy to help you and appreciate your patience when responding to each and every one of you. If calling, please leave a message and one of our Materials Specialists will return your call.

I would like to introduce you to the team, of whom I am so proud, so that you may become familiar with us, so when you receive a response, you will know with whom you speak.

Stacy Brock:

“I was born a painter. I concentrate on large abstract canvases, about fighting color and shape to create a physical response and I love using acrylics. Acrylics fit my style of painting because they dry quickly, can be used thick or thin and can be layered quickly and endlessly. I am also a ceramicist and often glaze my pieces to match the Op-Art nature of my paintings. I am equally a musician. I play bass guitar and I sing in bands and also create Sound Art. I like to make stuff and I like to learn new skills, so if I think I could make it instead of buying something I will learn how. I also have a background in commercial house paints and coatings.”

Mike Townsend:

“The painting process for me is all about reacting to what is going on while I work. When I am airbrushing, I employ soft color gradations with freehand masks and stencils and add line work as needed. When I am pouring, I use the information from decades of testing and previous artwork to come up with an ever-evolving approach to blending color with medium, using gravity to move liquid paints, then responding to the controlled chaos with additional color and technique. I am in a constant search for new methods and mixtures, and often I have not finished what I am working on before I start thinking about the next one. I enjoy the range of color, surface and the many products currently available to today’s artist.”

Scott Bennett:

“I am a painter who uses acrylic paints and mediums. While I have been drawing and painting since I was a child, it was around 1975 that I realized, in the professional sense, that I was an artist, a year after I graduated college. Acrylic came as the natural medium for me to use as it was a natural extension from my love of watercolor. My paintings are essentially abstract landscapes informed by my apprenticeship with non-objective painting. I like to have the open ended-ness of non-objective picture making that allows for a wide range of color, composition and image options within the framework of landscape painting. I use many different Mediums, Gels and Pastes blended mostly with Fluid Acrylics. My work is very painterly, showing a range of surfaces and paint handling from thin washes to thick knifed on passages.”

Greg Watson:

“I am an oil painter with a traditional background in portraiture and landscape. Recently, my interest in the materiality of oil painting has become the focus of my studio practice, upending an earlier obsession with proper technique and representational depiction. I now use abstraction as an opportunity to combine materials in a way that is experimental and lends itself to curious and unexpected results. I am fascinated with cracking, wrinkling, yellowing and other anomalies associated with the unorthodox use of oil paints and mediums. I still love painting portraits!”

Cathy Jennings:

“I love color. I am a painter of realistic landscapes in oils, acrylics, or watercolors. I paint on location and in the studio, and often work in series dedicated to my experiences of particular places. Watercolor best fits the feel of light and atmosphere when painting outside, so that is what I use on location. I love layering transparent veils of color to build form and light through glazing, and this is my primary approach with acrylics and watercolor. I do not have the patience to wait for glazes to dry when painting in oils, so with this medium I tend to work more opaquely and directly. I paint with watercolor on watercolor paper because I love the paper, and I paint with acrylics and oils on gessoed panels because I don’t like the feel of a flexing surface when using these paints. When not in the studio, my dogs and I garden, go for walks, watch the natural world, and read. Well, I read and they sleep or pester me until we play.”

Scott Fischer:

“I come from an oil painting background where I spent many years painting still life from direct observation, but I also enjoy the immediacy of working in mediums like gouache, watercolor and acrylics. In recent work, I have veered away from observational painting and have returned to the fundamentals of drawing. A change spurred on by a new found interest in industrial design, concept art and architectural drawings. What brought me to GOLDEN was the opportunity to learn more about and develop a deeper relationship with materials associated with painting, my first love. There aren’t many jobs out there like this!”

Mirjam Hintz:

“In my heart I’m first and foremost a painter, but my professional training has been in painting conservation. I first started out painting in gouache and egg tempera, then moved into oil and most recently included acrylic painting in my studio practice. I mostly paint figuratively, but like to include abstract elements. What I love most about painting is the physicality of it – smearing, pushing and dragging paint over canvas, spraying, stippling and pouring it – layer upon layer. I still practice conservation and I cannot look at a painting, e.g. in a museum or at an art show, without immediately studying its condition. If you see someone with their nose almost in a painting and contorting themselves to get views from all angles, you bet it’s a conservator.”