I was posting some progress images of a wedding portrait I am currently working on to my Facebook page, One Life Fine Art (if you are on Facebook, make sure to like and follow me there), and it occurred to me suddenly that the person for whom I am making the painting could actually be terrified by what they were seeing!

The first phase was the line drawing, the second, a grisaille in chromium oxide green, and the third was the layer where I work out my major colour story (in this case a series of full strength washes of pthalo green, green gold and Quinacridone red/violet mix).

On top of that I will start to refine the forms and paint in details, balancing lights, darks and colour as I go along. To me this seems natural, but to someone who has never seen a painting grow from sketch to finish, they might have assumed the process was something like paint by numbers or colouring books, where each clearly delineated area has its individual colour mixed and applied from left to right, in one go.

I suppose some artists work like that, but my paintings are more like a living thing, layers upon layers built up from the back to the front of the painting (or canvas to picture plane), with each layer growing from the layer beneath.

The major difference is in how preplanned the painting is. Am I merely executing something which already exists fully realized in my head, or am I working with the idea to create something unique to itself?

Working left to right, filling in areas in a planned and orderly fashion is certainly efficient, but doesn’t allow me to take advantage of coincidence or discovery. Knowing that I can’t possibly anticipate every eventuality in the painting, I would rather give myself the opportunity to stop earlier than planned or change things to capitalize on coincidences as they appear. I couldn’t see these coincidences and happy accidents if I were focussing on the orderly filling of areas of colour instead of an organic approach to the image.

So, should you be out there watching my paintings take shape and feel you are on a bit of a rollercoaster ride in terms of progress, never fear, we will arrive safely. You will just have to have a little faith in the process and trust your pilot. In the mean time, sit back and enjoy the ride!

A good primer on some of the major artist’s of our times, and their ideas and innovations.

It is an easy read, with a democratic 3-4 pages dedicated to each artist, even ones with incredibly long and illustrious careers like Picasso. Each artist is covered with a portrait, a timeline, a page condensing key points about their biography, career and innovations, and 3 or 4 representative images of work.

I would recommend this book to beginners interested in getting a crash course in art since the beginning of the modernist period. However, even as an artist familiar with the western canon and art since the beginning of the modern period, I found fresh insights on the work of familiar artists.

One critique of this book would be that despite it’s recent publication (2016) the youngest artists profiled are Damien Hirst and Olafur Eliasson. Could it be that titles for Art Visionary have yet to be settled for the artists of Generation X and beyond?

Okay, I know I have been away since March 13th, and if you have posted a legit comment on a post since then, I am genuinely sorry that it will not be read or posted, however 2800 pieces of spam are a little much to expect someone to sift through in order to find the one nugget of authentic human contact in my inbox. I skimmed the posts as I marked them spam, but for the most part they were neither specific nor relevant to this blog.

So, if you would like to have your post actually read and responded to, PLEASE make sure that it is specific and relevant, and is very obviously so. There are so many generic spam posts that are clearly copy and pastes, saying how wonderful this site or post is,  or asking general questions related to the technical side of blogging… well you see what I am saying, praise is only meaningful if its authentic right?

Anyhow, I am still here, still checking in, and I do hope that one day I will be skimming my inbox and actually see a legit post from one of you out there. So lets talk!