1.  Where do you get your ideas?

Mostly, they just appear in my mind.  It's a bit unexplainable.  This only happens when I'm not trying to think of an idea.  Often, I'll see a completed image in my mind's eye and know that it has to be painted.  It won't leave me alone and it never comes out the same as the vision.  Sometimes ideas come from snippets of conversations, or from things I read or hear, or lines from songs.  This gets a little woo-woo here, but sometimes I just ask the blank canvas what it wants to be.  It doesn't answer in words, but in process--"Start with blue...and use a big brush...."  Click here to see my Inspirations.

2.  How long does it take you to make a painting?

40 years or more.  This is a typical answer from artists.  I pour everything I know into putting together color, composition and subject.  It can be grueling work to turn nothing into something.  It requires patience, aggression, sensitivity, and, mostly, experience.  Making a painting can't be done just by applying paint to canvas.  A painting must be imbued with passion and life.  That's why the 40 years.  The "clock answer" is somewhere between 10 and 20 hours, but not in a row.  There's a lot of pondering time involve, too.

3.  What's your favorite color?

Such a limiting question.  I do have favorites, but mine are favorite combinations.  Colors don't come to me one at a time, they come in multitudes.  You may notice that many of my paintings contain the entire spectrum.   Traditional painting technique would have me using lots of neutrals with splashes of color.  My own style may be confusing and may lead to a lack of a focal point,but  I just can't help it.  My psyche seems to speak this way and there's not much I can do about it, except, perhaps, to silence my active psyche, but that seems like a bad idea.  That being said, I love love love teal next to red, or teal next to yellow.  Greens and purples together are favorites, too.  My paintings often start off with a color combination in need of a subject.  Orange and fuchsia, for example.  The great colorist, Henri Matisse, solved color problems by putting a little black somewhere.  I have made extensive use of this technique.

4.  What is your painting process?

I start with a blank, primed canvas.  To this I put on another coat of primer, using my hand or a piece of wood as a squeegee.  If I have an image in mind, or even a part of an image, I scratch that into the wet primer.  I use a heavy-bodied primer, so the texture remains.  When the primer dries, I draw my image in charcoal before I start building up colors.  Sometimes you can see remnants of the charcoal drawing in the finished painting.  It depends on how much I work the paint to get the colors to speak to me.  There is a moment in every painting in which I am completely discouraged and ready to give up, paint it white again and start over.  I have learned that this is a welcome stage in a painting's growth and development.  This is when the painting gets a voice and is trying to tell me what it wants--here is where I have to give up my ego's involvement and give over to intuitive, creative expression.  If I'm successful, the finished painting is a surprise to me, with a lesson I didn't know I was going to learn.