An artist’s thoughts on composition, mark-making, color, and intuition
The Whole Canvas Matters
Once I make the first mark, something else begins to happen.
The painting starts talking back.
I don’t just look at the subject. I look at the whole canvas—all four edges, the spaces between them, and everything that is happening—or not happening—inside that field.
When I was teaching high school, I had a way of talking to students about this that was a little crazy. But teenagers seem to enjoy a teacher who is willing to be a little clownish.
If I saw a student putting all the action along one edge of the painting, I might say:
“Imagine I order a pizza, and I tell the cook, ‘I want all my pepperoni pushed over to one side.’”
The reaction was immediate.
“That’s crazy! Who wants a pizza like that?”
“Exactly,” I’d say. “Look at your painting. You’ve put all your pepperoni on one side.”
They would laugh, but they understood.
If everything is happening along the left edge and the bottom, while the rest of the canvas is empty, the painting isn’t using its whole playing field.
I want to make the whole pizza.
That doesn’t mean that every inch has to be equally busy. Empty space can be very important. But the empty space needs to have a relationship to what is happening elsewhere. The eye needs a reason to move.
Where Does the Eye Go?
So as I paint, I’m constantly asking myself:
Where does my eye go next?
A color over here might lead me to a color across the canvas. A repeated shape might echo something somewhere else. A strong dark might need a lighter value to balance it. One mark can create a path toward another mark.
The painting begins to find its own direction.
This becomes especially important in my intuitive abstract painting. There may not be a recognizable object to guide the viewer. The painting itself has to create the paths.
Color can do it. Value can do it. Repetition can do it. Lines and marks can do it. Contrast can do it.
And sometimes the direction comes from something much more instinctive.
I go back to my scribbling.
One little scribble leads to another. I pick up a color and move somewhere else on the canvas. I respond to what I’ve already done. Slowly, the painting begins to build its own language.
Letting the Painting Speak
Sometimes a recognizable image emerges—a flower, a figure, a landscape, something I can connect to the tangible world. Other times the marks lead me somewhere completely abstract.
I like living in that space between the two.
I don’t want to tell the entire story.
I want to give the viewer enough information to begin imagining the rest.
To me, a good painting is a little like telling a good joke. You don’t explain every part of it. You give just enough information for the other person to make the connection.
I want the viewer to participate.
Leaving Room for the Viewer
Perhaps this is also why I hope my paintings leave room for the person looking at them. I know what I experienced while making them, but the viewer brings a lifetime of experiences of their own. That becomes part of the painting, too.
So the painting’s direction isn’t something I completely decide beforehand. It is something I discover as I work.
I make a mark.
The mark leads me somewhere.
I follow.
And somewhere in that back-and-forth, the painting begins to tell me what it wants to become.
Maybe that is what keeps me painting after all these years.
I never completely know where the painting is going.