Actually, silver or aluminum paint, or copper coat work better. A gasket leak on the left can be oil traveling up the left stud. The fix for that is to remove the stud, clean the threads, then loctite it in. The common leak around the push rod area is both a tolerance and an assembly issue. The tolerance issue is the spigot. They are normally too tall to allow the cylinder to fully compress the gasket. You need to dress the spigot with a mill file so that the head's mating surface will sit within 1/2 the gasket thickness of the cylinder's mating surface. Test this without installing the gasket. Don't take off too much. When you have the clearance set you can spray the gasket with one of my suggestions if you want. Not for the tricky part: Install the head, torque, in at least 3 stages, to spec, the WALK AWAY. Come back in an hour, torque again, then WALK AWAY. Come back tomorrow and torque again. Now you can proceed with the rest of the work.