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With all the controversy about mediums and solvents I've decided to follow the advice from Virgil in one of his other posts on this forum (Hi, Virgil!) and that is to paint with paint and not with medium.
I've started using only the absolute minimum of odorless mineral spirits to thin my paint and then only when really necessary -- and I've been using no medium whatsoever. I work alla prima so I don't have more than three layers in any part of my paintings. (I try to get what I paint done right the first time so I don't have to make layers and layers of corrections.) I also try to make my lowest layers physically thin and let them dry thoroughly before putting another layer on top of them. I hope the ingredients in my top-brand paints are more or less free of impurities (!) and I don't put anything else in my paint at all.
I hope this will turn out to be a good strategy, but most of all I hope that at least some of my work will be good enough for anyone to care about how well it holds up in a hundred years. That's what I'm really concentrating on!
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