Viewing Gwen John Paintings

I've just had a phone call from the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, returning my call, to say I can go next Thursday, a week today, to see the oil paintings by Gwen John that are in storage at the museum. There are none out on display at the moment, but the fact that I can go to view her work privately more than makes up for that fact. I want to go to see them because I've read about the unusual way she used oil paints, as apparently they were quite dry, that she drained the oil away from them before applying them, so I'd like to see this for myself. I also want to study her brushstrokes as the paintings always seem almost blurred, as though seen through tissue, so I'd like to figure out how this was done. I'll be able to take drawing materials to the visit, no paints, so I'll make sure to fill plenty of pages for my logbook studies.
When I was in the process of doing the recent figure painting of the girls I noticed how much of a difference it made to hold the brush loosely, and to paint in small side to side motions, especially with the longer handled brush, so I'm wondering if this is something that Gwen John did too. It helped to give it a kind of fluffy edge to the images in the painting, giving them a much more realistic and tactile appearance, so that it wasn't crisp and clean and plastic looking. I will experiment more with this technique, and will invest in a hogs hair brush, long handled, ready to try with oil paints, for any future figure work, like Lucian Freud uses, and I'll also try it to see how it works with non figure based images. The next project is the "movement" project which sounds interesting as it could be interpreted in so many different ways. But before that I still have theoretical studies work to finish for the figures projects.