For the past few months, I’ve been working on my craft—mostly concentrating on revisiting good practices that, for one reason or another, were abandoned or even forgotten. I’m focusing on the importance of composition, the benefits of a limited palette, and the rewarding discipline of mixing exactly the right color. (Which is so much easier when you once and for all commit to getting your brushes really, really clean.)
Over the years, I developed some bad habits that added up to frustrating painting sessions where I couldn’t find the right balance of colors, or had to restart a piece over and over because the underlying drawing had problems.
Cleaning up my studio recently, I kept finding abandoned paintings and some that I had pronounced finished but really weren’t. I made a little stack of these and started fixing them. I started with “Louie’s Door,” a small oil on canvas that I painted in 2006 and named after one of my favorite and most influential teachers, Louis Finkelstein—a professor at Queens College and Yale.
It was a wonderfully illuminating experience to completely repaint and reimagine a piece like Louie’s Door, bridging a twenty-year gap in my own history. I thought the process would go really fast and that I’d add a few brushstrokes here and there and the pieces would be finally ready to show. But I was wrong about that: I found that each one drew me in and I became totally immersed in the painting. Each time, everything was touched, everything was repainted, everything was reimagined.
In the process, I discovered that there are gaps in my knowledge. For example, I really don’t know how to paint folds in fabric, and my experience is extremely limited when painting patterns, textures, light, and that dark brown background that Caravaggio perfected and which I longed to know how to do. To bridge that gap, I began working from photos on small canvases to learn how drapery works.
I figured that a dozen really small canvases would be completed in a matter of days or weeks. That was 6 months ago and I only have finished 5. It turns out that small paintings take just as much time as large ones. There’s so much to do! Work out the composition, block in the major shapes, refine, refine and refine.
It has been great to reimmerse myself in painting this way, learning drapery but also relearning how to mix colors, how to layer paint, how to be more attentive to the medium and how it can harm or help the flow of the paint, how to choose the right brush for the job and how to trim unruly brushes. There’s so much to do!
