The Painting Process

The Challenge

Everytime I start a new painting I feel excited and I am in a total panic at the same time. I am sure every artist will know that feeling in the painting process. Allthough it is not easy to endure: I love that feeling!

Painting process:

When I start painting, I don’t take the paint and the brushes, but I sit and become aware of my feelings – my body. As soon as I can feel “everything” and don’t think anymore, I take my brushes and the painting starts. Sometimes the thoughts come back and want to influence my painting. At that moment I stop, sit, become aware of me in my body until the thoughts are gone and I continue with the painting process.

Mostly I don’t know what the painting will be. Then I paint and paint until I know what it wants to be. Sometimes the piece is so kind and shows me, in a short flash, how it will be. That’s always nice! The moment when I am getting to the end of a painting is, when I start thinking of a name for it.

You can see more about my painting process on my artist’s approach on the videos made at The Colorfield Performance.

Colours make me live

I like everything in my life to be colourful. Not only when I paint, but always in my life, like the flowers in my garden. In my house every room has another colour. I need colours and I need many of them, but they should remain in some harmony. When I am painting I sometimes limit my colours to merely three, just for me to stay in the same mood. Colours help me living and make me live.

Paints:

I use acrylics, oils, gouache and dry pastels. I would not restrict myself to only one sort of paint, because I like them all so much.

Acrylics:

Painting with acrylics means that you can take the painting wherever you want, because it dries very fast and you don’t get a mess.

Sometimes this makes the process more easy. You can paint it over and over again. I like the way the tinge always changes a little bit when you repeat the same movement on the canvas.

Oils:

Painting with oils feels like playing. It gives me lots of fun moments and a happy mood. I like the way you can mix and blend everything at the same time.

Although I know it isn’t very healthy, I love the smell of turpentine oil. It reminds me of the ancient shoe polish.

Gouache:

Painting with gouache means that you will get the brightest colours of all sorts of paint. It will always dissolve, when you paint it over with water or paint.

I love using gouache with wallpaper paste and than paint with my hands.

Pastels:

I like using pastels to make movements with my hands on the paper.

Of course I also draw with pastels but mostly just with my fingers and not with the chalk.

Medium:

I use all sorts of medium. I like the effects you can achieve with them. It is not always necessary to use a medium, sometimes painting with acrylics, I forget to use them. But I think the colour is more brilliant when I use a medium instead of water. It also gives the paint more body.

When I paint with gouache I only use water. When painting with oils, I use linseed oil, terpentine oil (Wow what a lovely smell!), or liquin.

Colour wheel:

The colour wheel has become important in the time I have been painting. The time I took searching and reading about the colourwheel really was well spent.

It clarified a lot of how I feel about some colours. It also showed me why I used which colour. Furthermore I learned to get depth in a painting and I learned so much about shadows.

Brushes:

As you can see I use lots of brushes. Each brush has it’s own specialty.

I also use all kinds of other stuff to put the paint on the canvas. Such as there are: sponges, spatulas stolen from my kitchen, spoons, cork, paper and cardboard, feathers, you name it. Most important tool: my fingers.

The Palette:

Always a big mess on my palette. This is acrylic paint and I have to keep it wet, so I spray water on it. It is not easy to get the water to stay in its place, because this palette is not really flat. It declines a little bit at the edges so the water accumulates there.

Do you see my black nail?

I had clamped my thumb between the car door. That was not funny!