PROCESS

To paint is to re-make! It is to take a subject or idea or feeling and capture it with colours and textures and shapes. We remake what is called the real world into a much larger reality that can be intuited and approximated and suggested and deeply felt in a successful work of art. It’s not only invention – it incorporates and remakes the rest of our world in a subtle and sensitive way. The work of doing this is totally engrossing!

This is not a literal transcription of anything. It underlines the necessity of having a life, a well-rounded life of experience and curiosity and knowledge, so deeply felt that it naturally permeates all our creations. Painting in that sense is the re-making of our life into a form that can be understood visually by others.

COLOUR NEEDS TO BE BETTER THAN OK

Colour is exciting, refreshing, joyful, and fulfilling. The trick is to get it right, on track with the right feelings, textures, subjects, and ideas. The key word is exciting, which is not to be confused with chaotic enthusiasm. It’s more thrilling than that, the soul-saturating fullness of completeness. Great colour is quiet exuberance!

It arrives almost before the painting does, with some unexplainable ping of recognition in a subject, a view, a stream of light, a visual event, or a vision. Then it has to get carried into the painting, the process, the choices of colour, the concentration, the exclusion of all distractions, until the painting itself works as a total event on its own. Quite something to achieve!

About Care

Enthusiasm carries more paint to the canvas than brushes or any other utensils! To have enthusiasm for life is positive, and that’s a true challenge. It means staying far from prettiness and insipid colours, and yet veering away from the depressing subjects and colours that come to mind when we listen to worldwide news events. And it’s a cop-out to simply manipulate paint all by itself – it would be more fun to work at finding a new colour for a paint supply company. A positive enthusiasm comes from having a vision of the world that would be better to live in than the world we simply adjust to every day. Artists see further and deeper than events, and enthusiasm is the vehicle they take to do that.