Process

Location
A good location is really whatever strikes my eye as having the potential to be a painting. A fair amount of the time I just go and plunk myself down and look all the way around, 360°, and get an angle that I like and just start painting. Some of the time I go to a pre-determined, thought-out spot because maybe I've painted there before and I want to elaborate on what I've done. But a fair amount of time I just wander and look.

A Blank Canvas
Nothing on it. No wash, No color. Some painters coat the entire canvas with a particular color. They may wash a canvas with grey or ochre, or tan or pink. Anything to kill the white. I guess what they're doing is getting one baby step into the picture because a big white rectangle can be intimidating. Blank, you know. But I don't do that. I have a big blank white rectangle and I start painting with thinned down pigment. Pigment and turpentine - thin enough so that it washes off easily and produces kind of a tone and I just layout the painting that way with a brush and the paint.

I sketch in outlines of the main masses and then fill it in with a thinned down version that dries very quickly - that I can paint right over almost immediately - and just start building up paint. Building from thin to fat. And of course in the process of doing that I can do a lot of correcting. I can move things around very easily, just wipe it off or just ignore it, and paint over it.

Completion
I paint for about two hours at a time, outdoors. In some cases that's enough to do 100% of the painting. In others, it's 70% or 80% of the painting and then I have the option of going back again - to the same spot and working more on it or if there's just some minor things I want to correct, I'll do that in the studio.

I read articles about people who spend two or three months on a painting.That's just so hard for me to get my mind around because two or three hours is the norm for me. But then again, my paintings look it - which is what I like.