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Here is one of the benefits of my way of painting. I believe that I fear mistakes less than many other artists.

The reason? I am an alla prima painter. I paint “all-in-one-go.” I paint quickly. I paint often. I finish a painting, nearly always, in the same session that I started it. I am comfortable with this. Consequently, I have invested less in each painting than an artist who might labor over one work for weeks, or even months.

 Mistakes in art are not deadly. I often tell my students, who can become paralyzed when the next stroke might mess up a   watercolor painting that is going well—“We’re not brain surgeons.  We’re artists. If we mess up, no one will die from it. It’s only paper.” Sometimes this helps, sometimes not.

 I have found great satisfaction in painting en plein air, because the sun limits my painting time quite naturally as it moves across the sky and the shadows and colors change.  I must complete the work in under 3 hours, and that suits me.  Boats, parked cars, animals in a field, and people sitting in cafes all accomplish the same thing. They are going to move, and you must learn to get down the essence of what you see quickly.

 I have also learned to match the size of the work I will attempt against the amount of time available to me in a session and the relative complexity of the subject—you get better at gauging what makes a 45-minute painting, a 2-hour painting, or a 4-hour painting. It won’t do to start a larger canvas if it’s going to pour on you an hour from now or get too dark to see what you’re doing. So you go with whatever size you can handle in your hour.

I do not require the same level of “finish” in a painting as many artists do, because their personalities require that and mine does not.  I usually find myself stopping just a moment before I think the painting is really completed, and then find out that, as far as I am concerned, it is.  I learned early on not to ask my husband, who prefers more a more polished and detailed style of painting, what he thought of one of my pieces. He would invariably say, “But it’s not finished, is it?” But yes, it is.

I rarely have a problem knowing when my painting is finished.  It is finished when I have put down enough information to satisfy myself.  It is most definitely finished when I begin to lose interest in it, or God forbid, become bored with some aspect of what I am painting. I am pretty sure that if I am bored with painting too many leaves or blades of grass, the viewer will be bored looking at them.

 I am a bit of a moody person. So as my moods change, my “handwriting” changes, and I do not want to mix up several kinds of handwriting in the same piece. Let it be all one kind of energy. To me, that is the great danger in “going back into” a work when my session is finished. I don’t like to do it, and will do so only when a painting keeps telling me that I need to come back to it. What I have learned is that once you go back into a painting in a new session, you make the mark that you had been thinking about. Then you make another mark, and another, until you are recreating that painting as a new painting. I will come back to the studio where there is more control to add a couple of masts to the boats, perhaps, but usually that’s it.

So I don’t layer my paintings. I don’t do it in watercolor; I certainly don’t do it in oils. It took me quite a while to learn to lay one clean stroke against another in my oil paintings so that I could paint in the fat, juicy style I admired so much in other artists’ work. And it’s too much fun doing it that way to ever want to change. In watercolor, I will layer up to a couple of washes, but I would find it tedious in the extreme to glaze layer after layer as so many watercolor artists apparently find pleasure in doing. I am always looking for shortcuts in watercolor and oils so that a step can be eliminated.  What skill do I need to master now to gain more control of the medium without increasing the time I spend on the painting?

That is the question.