Blog

I might be the world's slowest painter. At least it feels that way at times! The painting above took me a whole month.

My Life as a Landscape Painter seems to follow kind of a bumpy road. I get asked over and over about my process. So here's what a bit of my typical path looks like:

I get a clear idea of what I'd like to paint. I can look ahead and think "ooh that will be a good one!"

I get jazzed about getting it underway, so I look through my inventory of blank canvases. I might not have the size I want on hand, so sometimes it's back to square one before I even start. Detour! On a good day, I pull out the perfect canvas and coat it with gesso to prep it. I usually use black. This is called the ground.

Depending on what my scene is, I'm learning to stop and think about this step, as light blue skies and pastel sunrises can take a long time to paint and cover up a black background. I've also been experimenting with different colored grounds at times. Like the purple shown above.

Shades of orange or red are traditional and popular, but the few times I've tried those, I felt my eyes vibrating when I painted blues or greens over it.

So anyway, I let the gesso dry and then get started. Next step is to sketch out my scene, I use a white charcoal pencil and don't worry too much about being uber-faithful to every little tree or ridge - I'm just going for a general idea. Horizon line, tree line, big shapes. I've found the looser my initial sketch is, the less likely I am to get overly fussy with details in my brushstrokes. At least that's my hope. You can see in my photo I keep a reminder right on my easel to SQUINT. That's a prompt to simplify, which is almost always a better approach.

So everything I've described to this point can take a day - or a week - or wow there's dust growing on my blank canvas!

Roadblocks for me are often just simple truths that I don't always have the oomph left to paint for a few hours after a long day sitting at the computer. But trading my digital pen for a loaded paintbrush at night - that's like dessert! Sometimes it's for an hour, maybe more. But then some mights I don't feel like I want dessert at all so I'll just go downstairs and watch Gray's Anatomy.

A lot depends too on where I'm at in the painting. The absolute hardest part for me is to just get going. Dive in. Rev the engine and take off. Until I start covering that blank canvas up, I can't get it into 2nd gear. It's not that I don't know what to do - more that I don't know what to do first. I get a little ADHD I think and have 12 debates in my head about how this should go.

Eventually I get to the point where I make enough progress that I move into the Crap Zone. Regular readers know that pretty much every single painting sits in this space at some point. Most stay just for a little while, but some linger. This particular painting sat in that unhappy spot longer than many simply because I couldn't get back to it.

But then, some nights, and sometimes almost effortlessly, I'll start waving my brushes and it goes from catastrophe to "crap what time is it? I don't want to stop."

Ok yes there might be wine involved during these times. But not always!

From there, it's usually a coast along smooth pavement and before I even thought I'd be done, I am. You'd probably laugh if you saw how many times my hand and brush has hovered over my painting, and I realize there's no place left I want it to touch down. It can be very sudden, but when it happens it's a definite screech of the brakes. I put the brush down, step back, and most of the time, smile.

I'm so lucky.