Lately I’ve been exploring a lot of different painting methods so I can find out what works for me. I haven’t an optimal method yet  but after about 2 months of daily painting I’ve come to some firm conclusions.

1. If I think that the painting is important than it’s pretty much always going to fail.

For me failure is something I like to call “flat color.” It’s like I have all the correct value groupings there but for some reason the painting is completely void of life. Actually I know the reason. I spend too much time mixing color patterns and not realizing that I’ve been painting scared and not using bold saturated color. The human brain picks up on how hard it was for you to do a painting. We can feel the energy of the piece and quickly gauge if the artist is skilled or not. Which leads me to my next conclusion.

2. If the piece doesn’t feel good within 20 minutes, start over or move on.

IT WON’T GET BETTER. This is just like a bad relationship! I’m not sure why this is the case but it is. I just end up spending a whole day dilly daddling on some painting that I keep convincing myself looks good. It doesn’t look good. I know this when I open up a new painting and quickly paint something that’s light years ahead of what I’ve been working on all day. I think to myself, “Has this other painting just been a 10 hour warmup for this 20 minute masterpiece.”

Solution!

I’ll never work on one painting at a time unless it passed the 20 minute test. From now on I’ll be working on sheets of multiple paintings and setting 20 minute timers like I do with my morning color studies. If I do 4 lil paints and my batting average is .25 then I should be able to come out with one real piece by the end of the day. This should also lower the importance of each piece I do and therefore optimize results. We shall see.

One of the methods I’ve been exploring is starting from an abstract and shaping the abstraction into something objective. I think it’s fun though I would recommend doing a tonal sketch before you jump in. Here are two of my recent ones.

Anywho, that’s the end of my rant. New paintings on the way.

Greg Mitchell, I’m just now listening to podcasts