Finally the family portrait is finished and it can be shipped to the gallery. A major job and I really enjoyed the work. Like always the challenge was to get all four protagonists in a credible way on the canvas, engaged in the same moment in time. And of course, the resemblance had to be complete; the main criterion of commissioned work. On this matter I was in close contact with the client as usual, willing to listen carefully and if necessary making adjustments. I will miss the painting that has been for some month on my easel. Eventually everything leaves the studio.
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.
Last week we returned from our short trip to the Netherlands. And back to work right away. The project of which I wrote in my post of August 13thwas already on the easel waiting for me. Everything well prepared before I left. The sketches approved by the client, the linen stretched, covered with three layers of gesso and the drawing carefully transferred in red crayon. So, immediately after returning I was able to start. I like to work from nine to five. I never have to wait for the inspiration that Chuck Close writes about. However, I do need to be well focussed and the run up to that sometimes takes days. Part of the concentration process is applying the underpainting. In the final version of this painting there is a lot of blue and green, and that’s why I like to use a magenta undertone.
