Exploration and Discovery

Working Process

Right now I’m painting grasses, brush, autumn trees and waterways. I have an enormous collection of reference photos from which I get ideas to paint. (I carry my camera with me wherever I go, just in case something inspires me).

Most of my recent Acrylic paintings are on 18 x 24” canvas. That seems to be the right fit for the landscapes.

The painting goes something like this:

I select a photo or two, make compositional adjustments on my computer, do a little black and white thumbnail sketch in my sketch book to establish values (light and dark), followed by a rough (very rough) sketch on the canvas with chalk.

But first the canvas is primed with 2 coats of a mixture of exterior latex, Acrylic paint and Gesso. When this is dry, I paint the canvas with an “under paint” in a mid value. This enables me to go darker or lighter, painting the darks first followed by the lights.

So, here I am, enthusiastically painting away, listening to mostly Mozart until I get to more than three quarters of the way through, and then, BOOM, I get stuck!

This is when I place the painting upside down for a few days on the “viewing easel” until I see what to do to complete it.

The next crucial moment is when to quit as it’s so easy to keep going back to fix things.