A painting begins long before there is any paint.
For me, the real work happens in the quiet. In the weeks, months, sometimes years before I ever stand in front of a canvas. I am an emotional painter. I paint what I feel. And feelings, as anyone knows, cannot be rushed.
So I let the idea live in my mind for a while. I turn it over. I think about the colours, the mood, the composition, the model.
Some ideas burn bright for a few weeks and then quietly fade and that’s fine. If an idea can’t survive its own gestation, it probably wasn’t ready to be born. Others sit patiently in a corner of my mind for years before suddenly announcing themselves as the next painting.
Only once the idea has earned its place do I move to research. I look at the painters who came before me – my heroes, and I study how they solved the same problems I’m wrestling with. How did they handle light? What tonal range did they choose? How did they build tension and movement into a composition? I absorb all of it, and then I let it settle.
By the time I pick up a piece of charcoal, the painting already exists somewhere inside me. The canvas is simply where I finally let it out.
VI. The Final Glaze
After all of that — the years of thinking, the research, the composition, the drawing, the long months of layering — there is one last stage, and it requires patience of a different kind. I glaze. Using a Damar glaze, I work carefully over the surface of the painting,...
V. Building in Layers
Now comes the stage that drives me mad. Layering is the heart of how I paint, and it is slow, deliberate work. I begin with very thin paint — almost a wash — and I don't touch detail at all. Not yet. I'm only interested in tone. I work from the darkest shadows first,...
IV. Drawing in Blood
Once I have my reference, the drawing begins. I usually work in charcoal, fixing it carefully so it doesn't bleed into the paint layers that follow. But sometimes I reach for a pastel pencil called sanguine - derived from the Latin word that means blood. There is...
III. Choosing the Model
The model is never an afterthought. I choose who I work with carefully, because the right person has to carry the emotional thread that has been running through the painting in my mind, sometimes for years. When I'm ready, I spend a whole day with my model — taking...
II. The Sweet Spot
There is a moment, early in every painting, where I do something that might seem a little mathematical for an emotional painter: . On a blank canvas, I map out the Pythagoras division of the rectangle to find the sweet spots. precise lines, carefully drawn. Where...