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       Usually the most favorable mindset for doing paintings I'm happy with will involve having no expectations whatsoever. Once I've created an arrangement that is visually inspiring and I can't wait to pick up my brushes, my next priority is to try my best not to get attached to any results. It's counterintuitive and not easy to stay in that place, especially as I accumulate more areas I'm satisfied with. I end up having to let go of the results over and over again in the sure knowledge that the best way to bomb out is holding on too tightly. Thankfully, most of the time painting isn't like sports or theater where it's all done out in public with a crowd watching. More often than not, what goes on in the studio is more like the proverbial sausage making that it's really better not to see. Scraping and repainting, removing or adding objects, pacing, staring and a fair amount of recreational eating can all be part of getting to a finished product. To me, every painting is a puzzle I'm trying to solve and even when it's a subject I've painted many times before, only rarely do the pieces all fit together in a seamless fashion. It's exhilarating when that happens, but outside of practicing a lot I don't know of a way to nurture totally spontaneous outcomes that I'm consistently pleased with. As the saying goes --the more you practice, the luckier you get.

       I'm sure I wasn't as fond of the adventurous side of art when I was first learning to paint, although at 16 I'm not sure I had any thoughts at all about what direction I wanted to go. All I knew was that I had found teachers who gave me some concrete steps I could take to achieve the realistic results I aspired to. That isn't to say the outcomes I hoped for came easy, but just that there was some knowledge that put them within reach. The schools I attended followed a controlled and academic approach developed by an illustrator named Frank J. Reilly. You can find more about Reilly and his teaching methods at this link -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Reilly. My first teachers had both studied directly with him but the school he had established was no longer around by the time I began studying painting. In retrospect, it was very fortunate to have stumbled across a method which provided an ideal structure for learning how to observe, and a system for understanding the various properties of pigments.

     In other areas of my life like cooking or traveling, I've always been comfortable with a looser approach so perhaps it was inevitable that I eventually gravitated to a way of painting that left space for more adventurous outcomes. At any rate, looking back on it it feels like the changes in my painting over the years followed a natural progression. Always I've been fascinated with capturing light and form as well as interesting surface textures , and doing all of that in a way that appears effortless. While this was hardly the easiest thing to aspire to, looking back on the way painting evolved for me over the years, I'm grateful I managed to continue listening to my inner voice.

     This brings up an issue I think most people don't anticipate when it comes to the art business or even the non-art related areas of life.It's not the simplest thing to jump into a competitive arena and still keep listening to that inner voice.  As far as I'm concerned, the fun stuff all happens in these unscripted moments of serendipity so the challenge is to maintain a balance between the various demands on one's time and those things that keep painting an adventure. More people involved in the outcome translates into more pressure, so it takes a strong will on the part of the artist to guard whatever creative time and space they need to ultimately achieve the results they are hoping for. Sometimes that effort can seem like, at best, a self-indulgent luxury -- especially when the work isn't going well or feeling very productive.

      While there's a lot of luck involved finding a path and sticking to it, certainly I had my share of detours along the way. Still, what I ended up doing more or less follows the general advice I would give to any student; Find a teacher, or several teachers (preferably one at a time) who can help you become fluent in 'seeing' skills. Some people manage to figure out a way to teach these skills to themselves but a good teacher can often help speed up the process. It's also nice to just have the moral support from somebody who understands the difficulty of what you are trying to accomplish. Once the habit of trusting the visual information and making comparisons becomes established, that is when you can begin the journey of listening to yourself and figuring out how you want to go about expressing yourself using that knowledge. 

"Your style is the way you talk in paint." --- Robert Henri 

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken." -- Oscar Wilde