Shrewsbury Artists Guild Painting Demo

In late October, 2010, a few days before Halloween, I was privileged to give a painting demo to the Shrewsbury Artists Guild in Shrewsbury, MA. Though it would have been far less risky to demonstrate a painting technique or at least to work from an agenda of some kind, I chose instead to purposely be unprepared, specifically to show my audience that it was great fun to paint without a concrete plan. I brought no reference material of any kind and had no idea in advance what I would be painting. Landscape, portrait, still life, or abstract were all equally likely. The whole point was to make a mess an clean it up, to start with a big random swirl of color and react to it, trusting my reactions as I go from problem to problem until something emerges that I can work with and bring to completion.

Using Golden fluid acrylics on a 20″ x 30″ Arches cold press watercolor board, I started by laying down random swirls of color (mainly Quinacridone Magenta and Transparent Pyrrole Orange, which I chose simply because I love those colors). I then spent the next 2 hours reacting to what was there, pulling in the audience as much as I could to work out what to do next. To keep things moving, I did minimal mixing and lots of glazing. At one point, we ended up turning it upside down, which is where it stayed. For a while, what ended up as a sky was instead a pumpkin. It was Halloween after all so why not? Traces of the bright orange used at that time remain in the final painting, again because I love that color. As the demo progressed, the painting started to develop into a woodsy landscape – some trees, a pool of water, a sky. Nothing was set in stone though.

After the time ran out, I took the piece with me to complete later, which I did in three two hour painting sessions over the following six weeks. This is what it looked like at the end of the demo, or what I’ll call stage 1:

You can see that I left off with the pumpkin on its way to becoming a sky. As a whole, the picture seemed rough and undefined to me, so I spent my first two hour painting session sorting things out. I made the sky more sky-like, turned the pool into a stream, added some river banks, and worked on the trees some more. I was not satisfied with the river banks or the composition when I stopped, but the painting was too wet and needed to dry before I did anything more. So, at the end of stage 2, it looked like this:

I felt that I needed to think things over for a while, primarily to reconsider what I wanted to do for the composition. I didn’t like how the stream split the picture in half and forced the eye to move in one direction. Also, the value structure wasn’t there yet, so I needed to decide what to do about light source, where to place highlights and shadows, and color temperature. After a few weeks, I felt that I had some possible answers for these concerns, so I went at it again. I redefined the stream and river banks to direct the eye in a zig zag that connected with the background. I also defined the lights and darks to a level of consistency and made numerous other tweaks as the mood struck me.

I have found that when you paint this way, starting with no predetermined goal, reacting to whatever state the painting is in as you go, tweaking becomes one of the better ways to avoid getting stuck. I again stopped when the painting became too wet to handle, leaving stage 3:

Like before, I let it rest for a few weeks, again to think over the current state of the painting. I felt that the composition was starting to work, as was the value structure, but I felt that the overall tone was too cool. Also, the tree branches along the top weren’t convincing, and the water was too blue. In what turned out to be the final two hour session, I simplified and enhanced the values (darks darker, lights lighter), warmed up the overall tone (Quinacridone Gold to the rescue), introduced a lot of local color to the water, and tweaked everything else. I also worked on the foreground to make it more defined and less flat, and added my lightest lights along the top edge of the stream. So this is the final piece:

Painting this way, without a predetermined purpose or point of reference, shows you a lot about yourself. It reveals your artistic strengths and weaknesses that are easily obscured when you generally paint methodically. Discovering your strengths is obviously encouraging, while revealing your weaknesses will clarify where you need to improve.

Painting this way forces you to face your fears, makes you take yourself less seriously and begin to trust the process of painting on its own terms. Painting becomes less predictable and thus less trustworthy, but more likely to express something honest and alive.

Painting this way will likely open up unanticipated paths to explore in your art. Being too methodical and controlled can make painting too predictable, even stifling and boring, while dropping conscious control of the process can turn art into a voyage of discovery.

Personally, my experience with this approach has revealed to me that what generally emerges is a fantasy landscape of some kind – lush, dark, full of nooks and crannies, the very subject I would never have consciously chosen to paint before. I’m excited about this discovery and plan to explore it in future work.

Finally, painting without a plan is also a great alternative to painting nothing at all when you don’t know what to paint next.