Hunting for inspiration... what form will it come in I do not know. Light striking an old barn on a stormy day? A rooster in rich green grass? A beautiful model in the studio or simply seeing colors laid out on a palette? Some days inspiration finds us - other days we have to go hunting for it. Concepts stew in us, building slow over time, we feed them with values and lay them out in compositions. While we wait for them to mature, we do color studies and composition studies, or refine drawings. A dozen little color studies are always sitting around the studio reminding me there is a painting waiting in my head. Rushing a painting is not my thing, like a good bar of chocolate, I savor it.
Some paintings require the right reference, something we do not possess, in which case little studies are even more important. We never stop learning, we never stop understanding the world around us. Purple calls to us, wanting to be part of a painting of a summer storm and so we work it in. Colors, barely visible, wake up and call to us becoming the stars of a painting. Like a mystery movie, “who did it” is revealed when we finish. Greens and yellows star in a spring scene or a cherry blossom’s pink set off the new blue we wanted to try out. We plan and work out problems of composition only to have a color outperform our hard work on other aspects of a painting.
