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Thoughts on Art Studio Life:     "300 Year Old Church"

I'm trying to finish a painting of a three-hundred year old church with many graves and gravestones that are as old as the church. Knowing that many of the congregation have ancestors in those graves, I've felt an obligation to paint the gravestone shapes as accurately and as clearly as possible—while still maintaining a “painterly” hand.

Originally conceived as a smaller painting of only 20” x  20”, I quickly realized that it had to be bigger, so I increased it to 30" x  40" allowing room for larger brushwork on the relatively small shapes.

It worked! The church and the graveyard came easily to me, just flowing onto the canvas. Many people will probably consider the church and its graveyard to be the hard part of the painting, and it ordinarily would be. But not this time.

It’s the sky that’s making me crazy! I have a very specific feel I want to convey regarding light, motion, rhythm, spirituality and power, and that is not flowing onto the canvas at all. In fact, it will end up taking as much time to get the sky the way I want it to be as it took to do all that structural painting.

The thing is... these are my favorite problems! I always enjoy it when something like this happens; it means that I'm stretching myself and growing. I could easily dial in a beautiful sky and deliver the painting, and everyone would be happy with it. But I think it deserves more, which in this case is something that’s a bit hard for me. That’s a good thing! Being willing to work through the challenge, forces me to grow.

After all these years, I still find myself in deep water on a regular basis. Deep, because I purposely swim out farther than I have to. I’m comfortable with that. It’s more fun when it’s a bit scary.

I’ll post pictures of it in process along with the finished work, when it’s done.

Okay... now back to wrestling with this painting!