Lee Humphries president of ThinkingApplied.com, Minneapolis, MN. describes artistic process eloquently:
He writes
“…At its core, artistic process blends emotion with the disciplined pursuit of quality.”

He describes process in four steps:
Contemplation: Observation: Organization: Perseverance.

Painting live in the CBC studio in 2013 I included listeners by updating my progress on social media.
The risk of showing artistic process wasn’t without drawbacks.

Emails flooded in.

If I could paint that fast, it must be easy.
‘It’s just natural talent’, they wrote.
From my perspective, chalking it up to natural talent, quickly diminishes the amount of training/ work involved.
Viewers seeing the work evolve, like the painting at CBC, is like seeing the last 1000 metres of a marathon.

In painting, you develop skill with tons of practice, arriving to a point where mixing colours & the physical part of painting becomes an organic process- which allows the creativity sparks to take over.

It frees up space for the work to enfold.

Thou it may seem so, it’s never ‘easy’.
Each painting presents new challenges because every single painting is new. An original.

With interest in the new painting’ Rising Sun’,
I’m testing those risky waters again, to give you an idea of what happens behind the scenes.

Here are few stats:
It took one week to paint, up to 8 hours in one day.
Three years ago the foundation for the painting, inspiration and idea behind wanting to do a piece this large for it began ‘cooking’.
It’s been simmering every since.

I used 5 photo references, including one from friend Julia Hargreaves. ( thank you J!) Thou we paint in very different styles, I also asked Julia for feedback during the process, it was important she felt what I was trying to portray.

The shoreline you see behind me in the previous post is the shoreline in the painting.
I tested the waters by doing two paintings of the same shoreline, different perspective and sizes in the last three years.
See Boreal Sunrise 22×28 andSun 11×14

Rising Sun was a difficult composition to tackle, for one thing the sheer size of canvas, 5 feet x 3 feet- and the fact I wasn’t going to include a dominant foreground. I wanted light to be the focus, the feel of how that morning was, all misty milky warmth.

I didn’t do any prior sketches. At the first wash of sienna- I knew I had the feel of it, now to not mess it up.

I used cold wax & Oil, including nearly two 200ml tubes of the Cad Yellows.
I always mix colours by feel, no measurements, no colour charts, etc.
Palette is below. You can see those extra cad yellow tubes on the lined up above. I like to be organized.

Layering began slowly. I felt out the composition along the way.

I listened to music until the last day of painting.
I needed absolute quiet for the last day for focus.

At one point, there is always the need to do more, to play with it, to get more fussy, this is the most difficult time for me, I second guess, and add, take away.

I leave it for at least a day, returning with fresh eyes.
I view it in different light.

I want the viewer to have a new vision of the work each time of day, light and colour are added to help achieve this.

Process is always going to be a difficult question for me to answer.
A question I keep hearing lately “ how long did it take to paint Rising Sun?”
Three years and one week.. but in truth?
A lifetime.
:0)
~
New Work – 6×8 canvas boards oil & wax original