Showing Happy to the World (oil on canvas, 2018)

I try to work on my art every day. I decided many years ago to make it one of my top priorities (along with my family and my health) so it's usually other things - household chores and maintenance, returning phone calls, hobbies, reading, etc. - that get neglected or relegated to those infrequent moments when I have "free time". When I am immersed in a painting, I tend to become obsessive and highly focused for the days or weeks required to finish the work, spending many hours per day in the studio and not getting anywhere near the amount of sleep that I should get. This is due, in part, to my personality, as well as my process, which involves spending several days just mixing the colors for a specific painting before I begin actually painting, and requires that I keep working before the paint dries. These periods of focused work can be both physically and mentally exhausting (not to mention demoralizing!) and I usually need at least a week or more in between paintings to recuperate and to catch up on any pressing matters that were neglected whilst I focused on the painting.

During these respite periods, I still continue to work on my art, but in other, slightly less stressful ways. I believe that success in any creative endeavor requires disciplined study and practice balanced with intuition, exploration and risk-taking. Work and Play in equal measure. Exercise the right brain as well as the left brain.

Thus, during the periods when I'm not engaged with a painting, I use the time to both develop my craft and also to generate new ideas. Depending on my mood, I may engage in gesture drawing or other drawing exercises, create detailed, objective renderings from direct observation, learn to use a new media or technique, mix every possible permutation of a particular color or color pairing, transcribe works by the masters or simply read and study, all of which are geared toward developing my technique and knowledge. On other days, in order to develop my creativity, I will immerse myself in much more playful activities which involve working without any preconceptions or plan. Oftentimes, this involves grabbing a blank piece of paper and covering it with a color or two in pastel and then letting an image emerge. Sometimes, although not as frequently as in the past, the result is just a horrid mess and will either linger around the studio until I figure out how to make it into a successful image or end up in the trash bin. This is simply a by-product of the risk-taking involved with this sort of activity and failures are an integral and necessary part of the process. These disastrous drawings teach me what doesn't work, they teach me humility and they develop my resilience to failure.

But sometimes when I work this way - and herein lies the payoff - I surprise myself with wonderful ideas that I never could have thought of via any kind of left-brain, analytical, intellectual activity.

This impetus for this image was a drawing that happened in the way previously described. I've written in previous posts about how I have a stock of compositions in my head that are like tunes to a jazz musician, and I will often engage in improvising variations based on these structures. This image ended up being a variation on one such theme - the old Henderson barn at the intersection of the Wiley Road and the dirt trail that marks where the railroad once was, that I've drawn from direct observation more times than I can remember over the past ten years. I made the drawing almost a year ago and it has been taped up on the studio wall ever since, challenging me to develop it into a painting - a daunting prospect considering the complexity of the strange color scheme that emerged from my subconscious in the wee hours of some cold, late-winter morning. It also marks the return of architectural forms in my paintings, over two years after a conscious decision to eliminate them from my work.

I confess to procrastinating on this one because I doubted my ability to get all of these colors to work together on a large canvas. (I also had some trepidation about including anything that looked even remotely like a barn!) In the end, though, I forged ahead. The work must get done. It was a difficult painting for me, primarily because of the saturation of many of the colors, each with a strong personality, vying for supremacy in the composition, and making it difficult for me to achieve the quality of "inevitability" that is such an important aspect of my work.

Looking back, I realize that I couldn't have made this painting until now. All of the other paintings that I made throughout the year were necessary steps on the journey that led to this one and what looked like procrastination was really just me letting the work unfold the way it was supposed to. Of course, that only works in hindsight and the next difficult image that looms up on my horizon is sure to cause me at least as much stress...

But I'm quite pleased with this one.

Unless I Could Wait Forever (oil on canvas, 2018)

(Private Collection)

During my senior year of college, while I was planning for graduate school applications, my advisor suggested that I apply to graduate school as a printmaker rather than a painter because my black and white work was much stronger than my paintings (which was true). She told me that some people just "get" color and others don't and I was going to have to accept the fact that I was one the ones that don't. She said that was okay; I could focus on working in black and white. I was willing to accept this opinion at the time. I ultimately ended up applying to graduate school as a printmaker and the paintings that I did do during that period were essentially monochromatic. But I never really conceded that I couldn't master color. Years later, when I decided to seriously take up painting again, my lack of skill and understanding of how to work with color became immediately (and painfully) apparent. Unwilling to capitulate, I rolled up my sleeves and delved into a serious study of color. For three years I worked tirelessly studying the phenomenon of color-mixing and color relationships. I had taken a Color course at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts with the wonderful Maggie Fitzpatrick, which, based primarily in the theories of Johanas Itten, focused on understanding color as having three components (value, hue, and saturation) and using a 12-step color wheel composed of the three primary colors (yellow, red, blue), three secondary colors (orange, green, violet ¬– mixture of the primaries), and the six intermediate colors resulting from the mixtures of the primaries and secondaries. I read dozens of books on color theory, spent countless hours every night mixing colors and making color wheels and color charts and eventually transcribing paintings of some of my favorite colorists, first in pastel and then in oils, and I made weekly visits to museums and galleries to study the color in great paintings first hand.

And then I started making paintings. Terrible paintings. Dozens and dozens of terrible paintings. But I kept painting and gradually, almost imperceptibly, my paintings got better. Now, more than fifteen years later, I'm pretty fluent in the language of color. I can look at any color and see it's component parts and, although challenging myself with complex color relationships that I've never seen before is an important part of my process – and I relish those challenges – I feel confident in my ability to control the color in my paintings and to achieve the effects that I want, none of which has anything to do with talent or natural ability to "get" color, but is the direct result of a refusal to accept a limitation and to put in as much work as was necessary in order to overcome it.

Color relationships are one of the most important aspects of my work and, really, the primary subject. I always think about the colors for a specific painting before I begin and my process (which I have detailed here in previous posts) involves mixing all of the colors for a painting before I begin to put anything on the canvas.

This painting began with the impulse to make an image that had "brown" as the principle color. (I put the word "brown" in quotations because I think of all colors in terms of their value, hue and saturation and the colors that we usually refer to as browns are really desaturated yellows, oranges and reds.) Of course, as I began mixing my colors, many of them refused to be desaturated and the oranges, reds and red violets defiantly asserted themselves, causing me to increase the saturation of the blues and yellows in order to maintain an overall harmony. The result, quite removed from what I had initially intended, is really a painting based on the triad of primary colors (yellow, red and blue). As an artist, it's important to be able to subjugate our need for control and allow the image's own unique personality to bloom. (The same could be said of parenting!) In the end, that cool green in the bottom section made a surprise appearance and pulled the whole thing together, essentially stealing the show from the primary colors. It's my favorite part of the painting!