These days I’m limiting the time I take to make a painting to about 4 days. Before I’d take months to finish a painting and at some point it stopped becoming enjoyable or even beneficial. With shorter length paintings, the painting process gets pared down to the essentials and the spontaneous part of painting is celebrated.

Essentially, I casually pick a subject, spend about an hour composing it and then start painting. A lot of improvisation happens along the way. The composition will gain its strength and balance during the sketching process as I begin to more fully understand the project. Ideas solidify, small impulses merge together, colors harmonize and contrasts come forward. A painting acquires an identity when a character emerges. It’s very fulfilling when that happens and also enigmatic. Despite my best efforts to the contrary, a painting’s character seems to have its own free will and comes or goes as it pleases.

Most of the time painting is an enjoyable process, one in which I’m not fully aware of taking a creative role. It’s quite freeing to feel that I’m just along for the ride. When I get too dictatorial, the work suffers a bit from ideas getting stale, feeling stiff and weighed down with obligation. A painting continues for as long as I can still recognize and grasp for interesting and beautiful things that are within reach.

Oh and of course, being a realist painter, I still want the subject to look like itself, or rather not strip away its essential visual identity and its unique character. So you may wonder where I draw the line between realism and creativity? In my next post, I’ll address that question, talk about realism in painting and being a realist painter. Thanks for reading and please feel free to leave a comment below. See you next time!

Expressing beauty through art

When I paint, I look for beautiful passages that offer me excitement and ways to further explore the initial interest that I felt for something. It’s like following a multitude of paths and seeing which ones connect together to form a bigger design. There are many different aspects to see and paint but ultimately I choose one that leads in a promising direction. Sometimes it feels like weaving a pattern on the fly looking for rhythms, color harmonies and shapes, using the visual information from the subjects I paint.

For me, the beauty of a painting is often found during the painting process itself since it requires a certain kind of looking and patience to see it. In other words, the time and sustained effort it takes to make a painting often runs far longer than what my first superficial impressions can provide. During the painting process my impressions change and gradually come together to a form a more balanced, structured and often more abstract perception.

 

I suppose I’ve chosen beauty as a main theme of artistic expression because I recognize it as a philosophical way of viewing life. Beauty is a harmonious outcome to previously disordered elements; it’s a meaningful way of understanding oneself and others in relation to civilization or to a wild chaotic natural world. It’s an optimistic approach, certainly, one that hopes that people will find better purpose in the moments that are peaceful and harmonious. Not that any painting is going to change the world but I’ve always been happy with making small but positive contributions on a manageable scale.

Beauty is harmony when experienced by our senses and intellect. We’ve learned to recognize it and to create it by naming its individual components and learning their organization. In music we hear it in combinations of harmonies, rhythms, tempos.

It is similar in painting where patterns, colors and compositions delight the eye. Beauty enters our senses, is comprehended by the mind and opens a door to the heart. When it enters, it leaves a lasting impression on a person. In apprehending it, one often gets the sense of a grander organization that has the power to weave meaning into previously unimportant ideas or things. To express myself in painting is to try and record this beautiful experience, this grander organization and in doing so make the world a more meaningful place.

On art and inspiration

Often people will ask me who my favorite artist is, the one who inspires me the most in my career. Actually, I have two favorite artists.

Don Music

Salieri in Amadeus.

To me, creativity and self expression flow when we can find an honest place in ourselves despite all the other roles we have to play. But that impulse must be continuously rediscovered as we learn, change, profoundly experience the ups and downs in life. Perhaps that’s the most significant aspect of art for me- the pulse it has on the human spirit.

On an every day level there is also an aspect of painting for me which is fun and continues to be exciting throughout each year. I enjoy the freshness of paint, a crisp feeling of color and an exciting design. Painting offers a chance to improvise with a style or mood using a familiar subject matter- in the same way musicians might play with a popular tune. For instance this still life of Apples plays off of a zigzag composition very much like Cezanne’s. However my style wanted to go with a different color harmony and a greater feeling of form and light.

 

Without food for the brain and excitement for the eye, the act of painting can be indescribably tedious. A painting is a physical recording of an artist’s emotional, brain, eye and hand activity, therefore the best paintings are those where the artist is completely involved and not going through the motions. Like a music performances, the best recordings are moments in history and when it’s over there’s no fun in doing it again.

On being an artist

I have always enjoyed creating things with my hands. When I was young, arts and crafts was my favorite pastime, along with reading. I felt a great satisfaction in making something original and well crafted. Being creative was thrilling and offered a way to turn ordinary things into something unusual, a bit magical. My artistic beginnings sprung from imaginative fancies- daydreaming, tales of fantasy, adventure and discovery.

One of my favorite childhood books: A Time of Wonder by Robert McCloskey