My Painting Process

In the five and a half years that I've been painting, I think I've learned a few things.  If I'm paying attention, sometimes I remember those things when I'm painting.  A lot of the time, I remember them when I'm driving home from the studio, after having struggled a bit. 

One of the things I've learned is that painting is about decisions and choices.  If you stick around and read this entry, I hope you'll see what I mean.

Perhaps you can tell from this photo, the painting started out with a different version.  Version 1.1 was a disaster.  What to do?  What to do?  Paint it over of course and start afresh.  Primarily, the composition was ho-hum and I took an experimental approach that just wasn't working.

I wanted to make a bolder statement, so I re-drew the major shapes and tried a different color scheme.

Liking the color choices, I felt as if the highlights were too garish and stark so I tried to knock them back a bit.  If you hang with me, you'll see that they change several times over the course of the painting.

Time to flesh out the painting some more...those weren't just spheres in space, but shapes in relationship with other objects.

And time to start thinking about the background....

And how the objects relate to one another.



I thought I might be getting close to the finish line, but I wasn't.  Did the upper right hand corner look empty and unconsidered? Yes.  And yes.

I (creatively) cheated a little bit in thinking about how to resolve this question.  I could move and remove the leaf templates without having to make a painting commitment. 

I believe I'm moving towards resolution, but the upper right hand leaves are too light and don't add as much weight to the composition as I had hoped.

Happy with the composition, I made some final adjustments to the colors.  And stopped.

For now.