Creative Process

The inspiration I find in my spiritual life is the beginning of all new paintings! I’ll spend weeks, months, sometimes a year or longer just letting concepts brew as I wait for Divine Inspiration to guide my imagination to the perfect images!

My sketchbook has always been the place where ideas come together! I love to draw fancy & colorful images and sometimes these get put into paintings, but most of the time it’s just scribbles when it comes to planning out a new piece. I try to keep it loose, without color, and focus mainly on composition & flow. The initial sketches never get very detailed, I like to leave a lot of room for exploration on the canvas and be surprised by the colors that appear!

No matter how excited I am to begin a new painting, I allow each painting to take on a life of its own. I have little control over how it turns out in the end, so I try not to overthink it. Paintings NEVER turn out the way I initially imaged them anyways, so I just go with the flow & follow the muse! Maybe one day when I’m old & grey, I will have perfect control and think ahead strategically, but sometimes the paintings surprise me and turn out even better than I if I’d had complete control! Either way, I’ll always be learning & Every single piece teaches me something new, so I’m always approaching my practice with the focus and aim to refine my skills.

When I get out a new canvas, I begin by laying down Modeling Paste with a pallet knife. This medium is usually used to create texture, but I use it for the opposite, to create a smooth surface. Then I use sandpaper to smooth it down even more. I like this medium because it is absorbent, and it is almost like painting on paper which is perfect for my current style!

After a bunch of paste & sanding layers, I get out the acrylic paints! There’s nothing quite as satisfying as mixing up new colors! I use acrylic much like watercolor, very thin and watered down, this allows me to create fine lines without globs of paint making the lines thick & uneven in unexpected spots. In fact, very often it’s only when looking very closely that my brush strokes can be seen in my work.

I paint in as few layers as possible, straight on to the white paste, this allows for all my colors to be backed with pure white, creating a super bright and vibrant look! I love the way Modeling Paste feels to paint on while it’s still raw without any color, it soaks up my paint with such ease! This causes me to make lots of fine and fun lines & I get carried away with the details! Getting carried away is no exaggeration! And since I paint in very few layers this usually means I’ll be filling in around the detailed lines later. This is a very time consuming process indeed and many people ask, “Why not just paint the background first?” But speed is not a priority for me & I honestly love to paint in a highly focused state of mind! Besides, without this technique I would lose a lot of the vibrancy I mentioned earlier and be working in an entirely different style.

Besides that, I also love working in acrylic because it dries so fast. This is really useful for detailed work as I smudge what I’ve already completed much less often & I can rest my hand on my canvas for a steady brush.

After much fulfilment, fun, & satisfaction, plus a few hundred hours, I have a new piece! Then I paint the sides, seal the surface, put hanging wires on the back, write a super long description of all the things I contemplated during the process, take photographs, upload everything out to my website, send emails and wait with eager expectation for the right owner to come along!