1. Angry Penguins
"Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida," is the most popular of Ivan Albright's paintings. It's an excellent example of the very best of his work. His method of painting remained the same from piece to piece; he would ask someone to model for his painting and then prepare an elaborate arrangement of objects to surround the subject and to complete the composition. Choosing and arranging these supporting objects might take weeks before Albright was satisfied and the model might be asked to sit repeatedly for over a period of weeks or months before the painting was completed.
Whenever Albright began a painting, he'd carefully use charcoal to draw the whole composition on a prepared canvas. This seemingly simple step, would often take him several months to complete; and only when he was fully satisfied with it, would he begin the process of applying paint. When he painted over the charcoal, he'd do so with extreme care, often only covering a 1/2 a square-inch in a five-hour working day. Once, Albright painted a portion of the piece, he never retouched it or attempted to improve it.
Each object in his paintings would require a new color palette, but because he painted such small areas each day, he used only small quantities of paint. At the end of a work day, he'd put small pins on the model in the area where he would continue painting the next morning and white specks on the canvas where he would be painting.
Ivan Albright was greatly influenced by the great painters of Northern Europe, and he tried to emulate their working habits in every way possible. For example, instead of using oil paints available in stores, he ground his own colors. He then mixed them with poppy-seed oil, rather than the more commonly used linseed oil. The result was that the thinly painted surfaces seem to glow, almost like oil-stained water--and very much like the art of early masters of oil painting who worked in Holland, Flanders and Germany, such as Martin Schongauer, Quentin Massys and Hieronymus Bosch.