Bringing the vision to life.

The painting process

There are a number of reasons painting is difficult and at the same time very rewarding for me. In my search for something unexpected, every new piece feels like I’m starting from scratch without any competence. It’s a nerve wracking endeavor, but that sense of risk is what makes it a heady experience. I’m addicted, and here’s why.

Years ago I started working with acrylic paint for practical reasons, but it didn’t take long before I fell in love with the way acrylic behaves. It’s the perfect vehicle for my abstract paintings. It dries quickly so I can easily repaint to repeatedly adjust colors or change composition while I’m searching for something I like.

In my personal life I very much like to plan ahead. Not so in my paintings. There it’s much more exciting for a control freak like me to start without preconceived ideas. Hence, I never do preparatory drawings; instead I just load a brush with color and go at the canvas. Oh, the patient control freak is still there, in the recurring elements that interest me—circles, stripes, lines, checkerboards, flat hard-edge shapes, however I recombine these in different ways and sometimes juxtapose them against looser painterly surfaces, in a search for something surprising to happen, something I couldn’t have planned.

I’ve found over time that techniques which come from my background as a screenprint artist have influenced my painting process. For instance, I use stickers and tape to mask areas before painting and then remove the mask to reveal layers beneath. Patterns build up as a result, but I’m looking for something in addition—a sense of depth in the flat painting surface. Where shapes appear to float on top, or where it seems we’re looking through openings at something further back. I can add transparent effects that enhance this quality by carefully choosing my colors.

I love that painting gives me immediate control over color throughout the process. There’s no waiting. After a minute or two of drying time, I see exactly what a color looks like in its surroundings. If I don’t like the result I can overpaint til I get exactly what I want. As a result, I’m endlessly learning how one color affects the color it’s next to, or how a rainbow of colors interacts with black and white. I occasionally decide to use hues I think I hate, with other hues I think I hate. That helps me learn that there are no bad colors, and it gets me out of my comfort zone so I can discover new harmonies or discordances.

A critical choice that affects my process is that I paint simultaneously on several separate panels. They may gradually combine to form one continuous rectangle or shape, or they may remain separate but dialogue with each other. Sometimes new panels get added to resolve a composition, or a panel may suggest a different plane from the rest and enhance the sense of layers and deeper space.

When a painting is close to being finished but something is still missing, I can be hesitant to overpaint complex areas that would be hard to reproduce. That’s when I use the computer. I bring a photo of the piece into a graphics program, where I can add potential layers to try out ideas. When I get what I want I’ll go paint that onto the piece. If it’s difficult to achieve the quality of new lines or shapes I see on the screen, I can get a computer printout sized to fit and trace it before painting. 

For all these reasons I look forward to the challenge of every new painting. It wouldn’t be as thrilling if it were easy.

A form is created on the wheel…