Works on Canvas

To build a canvas, you first choose the size and thickness of your stretcher bars, stretch the canvas around them (you need strong hands for this!) and staple, then prime and sand and prime and sand the coats of primer as many times as it takes to get you to the background texture desired  (usually about three rounds of this, in my case).  Or, you can go to any art supply store and buy a ready-to-use canvas  (which I do use from time to time, if one crosses my path). I wouldn't expect most people to pay attention to the direction of the brush-strokes of the primed surface under the painting, but somebody should.  A blank canvas isn't blank at all.

PS - If you look closely, you can see my handprint in the lower left corner on many of these works-  my way of showing that I built the painting from surface up.

Works on Paper

Sometimes, convenience wins, as when I want to work 'on-site'.  It's much easier to transport a pad of paper than a pile of panels.

It sometimes seems that it takes longer to prep the surface than to paint the painting.  Which means that working on paper removes the pressure to live up to the surface.  Which makes it therefore annoying when a painting done on paper works better then a larger version done on a more prepared surface.  On the plus side, with no investment having been made in prepping a canvas or panel, it's much easier to let go when something isn't working-  or cut to the chase when it is. 

I want to call these paintings studies-  but then, every painting should be a study in that you should learn something from having made it, so they are, in the end, no less or more 'final versions' than paintings made on any other surface.

Works on Wood Panel

The first 10 paintings on this page are taken from images acquired from the cross-country drive that moved me from Los Angeles to New York.  If you would like to see how durable a painting is, stick it in a pod with a bunch of other paintings, move that pod 3000 miles, open it up on the other end and see what the condition of the work is.

Nothing is permanent, of course, but people have painted on plaster paintings that have lasted for thousands of years.  I am still learning the chemistry, working out the correct ratio of ingredients, playing with texture, and so a thousands years old technique is somehow still new, at least to me.  One of the downsides of the learning curve is that early attempts were very prone to chipping.  This is actually a good thing when the painting is bad, making it easy to chip it off and re-plaster the panel and try for a better painting.  Unfortunately, as I have become better at plastering, the paintings have become much sturdier and much harder to chip away.  Happily, I think the paintings themselves are also getting better, so I feel less need to do so.

Linked with those thousands of years I can pretend that what I'm doing might even last.