Patience and Painting

I have learned recently that relearning patience is probably something I will do again and again through out my life when it comes to painting. Perhaps that is what my struggle in the studio this year was about. I have a need to produce and show new work frequently via Flickr , FB , etc. And this need needs to learn patience because I am not producing as quickly as I have been used to in the past. I am painting more patiently . Fortunately for me I work on several paintings at once so when one has got me stumped, or if I am simply losing interest in a particular piece I can move on to another one. This frees me up from getting precious about any imagery in the former painting and allows me to come back to it with fresh eyes, turn it upside down and continue the composition from a different area of interest. The crucial thing is to keep a flow. I am happiest when I have several paintings in different stages. Completing a piece without something else in the works can be a problem. But then painting is all about creating and solving visual problems. I just prefer to have several problems happening at once so that one problem does not overwhelm me.

     Flight Through April                                                                                      12" by 15"



    It seems like my flying dreams have actually overlapped with a painting in a rather direct way. I have been asked if my dreams are the inspiration for my work because so many of my paintings have a dream like quality. Although I do dream about painting and paintings the imagery never literally ends up in an actual piece. The closest I have come to that before the above piece was a dream I had  of painting with yellow. The next day I decided to do a yellow painting. I stuck with a lot of yellow through out the process of working on this piece which in itself is quite a feat. Many of my paintings started out as something completely different. A predominately blue painting may have begun as red and gone though many layers and hours of other colors before it was finally finished. In "Flight through April" I painted as I always do with nothing particular in mind. But somewhere in the weeks I was working on it I had one of my flying dreams and I noticed when I next worked on this paintings that the figures were flying. My paintings will get where they are going in their own good time, and in new and different ways I never expect. The key for me is patience.