THE PROCESS OF ART

I’ve been drawing since I was in preschool, starting with a number two pencil and working my way up to color pencils. I sold my first animal drawing before I was 13 years old.

A few years later, I met an artist and friend Brenda Baker who then introduced me to acrylic paints. I started selling commission pieces from that time on. Now, I work primarily in water mixable oils. This is my preference of medium because I have more control of making my paint as thick or as thin as I want, blending the values evenly through each other.

It’s feeling and emotion that strike my interest and pulls me into my subjects and how I see them. I love giving the observer freedom to identify with it personally. My desire is to give each piece its own individuality as though it has a story to tell.

With the excitement of a new piece, I find a canvas a little larger than the image in mind. Using a fairly thin brush, like a number two Artisan, I paint the underneath shapes with my darkest values. I use a two-color mixture of French ultramarine blue and burnt sienna. Starting off center of the canvas, I draw with a streamline flow securely guiding the brush. This creates my foundation. I can always go back and change it if I like. There are no mistakes because the more I work with the shapes and values, the more in depth it appears. During this stage of the piece, it starts taking form and develops to the next level of the process.

The freedom of color has everything to do with the mood of the piece and the feelings it evokes. I find the best colors for drama are cadmium red and cadmium yellow against Lamp black and any deep blue. I do not lay down one color and then another working dark to light. Rather, I build section by section meshing all my values together almost digging into the piece and drawing it out so to speak until it all pulls together. As I do this, I am turning the canvas every which way until all of the dimensions line up. It helps me peer into my subject even deeper, allowing me to see the full scope of the picture.

Another technique in this process is not to look directly at the spot I’m working on, but just above it. This gives me a more extensive view of my subject. I never know the time frame of a piece, until it unearths itself. However, I do know what the outcome will look like before I begin. Clean edges help in making the painting seem real, almost as if it were separate from the canvas.

As with anything, the whole process is about balance, being careful not to over do or under do a painting; but rather working with it until I know there is nothing more I can do to make it any better. I find that the hardest part of a painting though, is signing the piece, because art is a continual learning process and so I never feel like I am finished.

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