Process

When I come up with an idea for painting, that launches an entire process. I think about the overall design and then need to figure out how to actually paint the subject. This takes me into the world of realistic photographs. I start by making detailed paintings using photographs as reference materials. As I go through this process, I find ways to make the painting simpler than the painting that came before. Sometimes things work well. Sometimes they don’t. But somewhere around 100 to 150 paintings later, I settle on the design that works.

Then, I follow the centuries-old tradition of painting the same subject repeatedly. Each time, finding subtle ways to improve the painting from the prior painting. When you buy one of my paintings, you join this tradition of owning original art that is part of a broader body of work. The design has been painted before and will be painted again. But your individual piece of art is unique. This is further enhanced by my current use of ink on raw canvas. No matter how much skill I have with the ink, brush, and Canvas, there is a bit of randomness in the way these materials interact on any given painting. Often I have three examples of the same subject at a showing. A customer can stand and look at those three paintings for half an hour to decide which one of them speaks to them the loudest.