Blog

        For this month’s blog topic, I’ve picked a question I often get asked; What time of day do I usually paint? The most common advice is to schedule priorities first thing in the morning, and I can't argue with the wisdom of that. Our physical and mental energy is often at its best then, and the longer the day goes on, the more likely it is to be hijacked by some interruption. While it does sometimes happen that I’m painting early in the morning, I haven’t found it practical to pull that off consistently when I take care of almost everything on my own and share my space with 5 adorable cats.

      Actually my favorite time to really settle into a painting is in the afternoons. A typical day in the studio might be puttering around midmorning setting up a still life, rearranging the furniture to get the angle of lighting I want, stretching canvases, laying out fresh paint, etc. My goal, once I begin putting paint to canvas, is to spend several uninterrupted hours establishing a substantial area of the painting to the point where the edges (working wet into wet) won’t need to be repainted. For the way I like to work, what seems produce the best results is enough time to correct any drawing errors, but not enough time to noodle or dawdle. The sure knowledge that the sun will go down and I will have to stop in a few hours functions as a Goldilocks zone in a sense. If I don’t have something on my canvas I’m reasonably comfortable with by then, I usually figure I’m better off making a fresh start the next day and/or possibly altering the composition a bit. All of this is predicated on the results I’m hoping to achieve (a feeling of effortlessness) and my preference for working from life under natural lighting. Although my studio here in New Mexico has fairly consistent light throughout the day, sometimes for a larger painting or in the shorter days of winter, an earlier start is a necessity. Another consideration for when I get started is whether storms are predicted that could change the light dramatically during the course of the day. Over the years before I built this studio, I definitely had to adopt other schedules, either to take advantage of the best natural lighting that was available or because I had a job to pay the bills part of the day. 

   So this is a complicated answer to a simple question, but to me, it makes a lot more sense to take into consideration what I'm aiming to do rather than trying to stick to an arbitrary fixed schedule. Working from life by natural light requires more effort and demands more flexibility, but to me the results are worth it.