I have been busy in the studio preparing for my upcoming shows and find myself working on a new piece on a canvas measuring 16″ high by 40″ wide.
After the canvas has been prepped with multiple layers of gesso and a layer of black paint, I compose the painting by laying in the elements of the picture in red oxide paint.
This is my favorite part of the process, the time when I can just let my mind fall into the picture and roll around all the possibilities that it offers. Every stroke is a decision and most are made instinctively, letting the surrounding elements and the underlying texture dictate the next move.
As the piece progresses, the painting takes on its personality in a warm glow of varying reddish tones. At this point I decide where I want to place the focus for the painting. Here I want it to be all about the sky. Painting the sky at this point is not always the norm. Sometimes I go to work on the landscape first, letting it tell me how I will treat the sky. But on this piece the sky comes first, so I begin to lay in colors radiating from around the sun. Or moon. Nothing is really set in stone- or paint-at this point.
As the sky progresses , I veer off momentarily to lay in a little color on the houses and the flat fields that occupy the middle of the painting. I am now at a point where I still have work to do on the sky but the painting is beginning to speak plainly to me. I know what it is and have a fairly good idea of where it can go. I say fairly good because there is still a lot of decisions that will affect the final version. The colors of the landscape, for example, and their intensity and tones.
I am almost always at my most deepest level of infatuation with the piece when I am at this point in the process. The moodiness of the red tones have a shadowy effect that pleases me, that makes the sky contrast a bit more than it may after the colors of the landscape are added. I find myself asking this morning if I should forgo the colors I normally add and focus on creating a tonal composition based on the red oxide. It would be a darker piece than my normal work but if it works as I hope it might, it would carry that feeling that always hooks me as I am working.
So this morning I am sitting here looking over at the easel and deciding if I will spend the day in bright color or in shades of russet.
I like a job where that might be the hardest decision that must be made today…
Redtree Times 
This is only an observation, and no response is necessary. But I did stop at this: “Every stroke is a decision and most are made instinctively.” To speak of decisions as instinctive seems not quite right to me, though I can’t say why. Perhaps it’s because I think of decision-making as conscious and intentional.
In any event, it will be interesting to see what you decide. A tonal composition would be interesting to see.
That’s a good point, Linda. The decision making in my process is not really cut and dried. The outcome of even the simplest next movement is never absolute. When you come to an intersection of two roads heading to unknown destinations and want to continue onward, you make your choice based on what little information you can glean in the moment from your observation and intuition. Maybe intuition would have been a better word choice instead of instinct.
I do like to think of many of my life decisions as “intuitive planning.” Only in retrospect do the events that led up to the change become clear. That’s why so many things seem inexplicable to those on the outside (turning to varnish as a career, for example), but to me, looking back, the steps are as plain as day.
Thanks for sharing your process.