Entrée

Confession. I’ve always been a rule follower. I happen to like rules. They make me feel secure. Any good board game is enjoyed most when everyone’s playing by the same rules. I downloaded Catan on my phone once and it was strictly worse, because I realised how much I enjoyed talking to real people across the table, and the politics of the game.

So when I tell you to break the rules of painting, understand that it costs me something.

Here’s the key. Learn the rules. What you can mix with what. How to layer. How to start. How to prepare the surface. There are rules, and they’re different for different mediums. Rules for drying times. Rules for curing times. Rules for preparing a canvas properly, layering it properly and painting on it properly.

Learn every single one of them. Then you’ll know how to break them.

You can break them all straight off the bat, sure. But your painting might crack. Your paint might never dry. Your colours won’t be what you wanted. Learn the rules you need, so you can break them on your own terms.

On any given day in the studio we’re breaking a lot of rules. Combining gouache with acrylic. Maybe adding oil. Maybe epoxy. But we understand the chemical reactions between those mediums, because one thing I have to build into every work is that it’s archival.

What’s archival? It lasts. It stays beautifully coloured and, in a stable environment, lasts ideally for centuries. Not millennia; this kind of paint won’t do that. Oils and acrylics: beautiful colours, wonderful to mix, and we’re talking around five hundred years for both. The only one I’d back for millennia is egg tempera. But five hundred years is enough time, I think.

Some people need limits to start at all. Total freedom, that level of wilderness, stops the painting from ever existing. So art schools will set limitations, like only use blue, to help you spread your wings and flourish inside them. That’s totally fine.

The limitation I like is the brush. I don’t like palette knives. I don’t like cloths. I don’t like using my hands much. Every colour, every medium, anything else goes, but it all goes through the brush. The entire work is funnelled through that one little conduit onto the surface.

After three or four wild layers, I start getting much more strategic with colour. Sometimes it’s clinical the whole way through. Sometimes it’s the wild west at the start, then clinical choices to bring the picture off the surface. That’s why you get a bit of every colour in every part of my work. No colour gets left behind. Every painting has the whole spectrum, about fifty-two different pigments, building the image together.

People get stuck when someone asks, “What do you like?” On the spot. Tell me who you are. Make a decision. Now. Now. Can’t.

The best way to develop taste, affordably, is to disagree. When someone says something you fundamentally disagree with, it helps you understand what repels you, and so, in the opposite direction, what you’re magnetic towards. I don’t like A, B, C and D, and I hate E, F and G. Perfect. Line them up. What’s in the opposite direction? Actually, I kind of like those things. Bang. Who’s developing taste? You are. Simple as that.

And here’s a fun fact to go with it. All the Pokémon towns are named after colours, Viridian, Violet, and the one that isn’t is Pallet Town. Palette. How fun is that?

Here’s the first stroke. Breathe.

I’ve said it over and over: the first stroke should be technically irrelevant. A painting is a culmination of a whole bunch of good strokes, and the first one is just the first guest through the door. But I still want it to be a good one. I still want to hit it just right. That’s the contradiction you live inside as a painter. Nothing matters, and everything does.

Where do we start? Down in the rippling water, or on the horizon line? Right there. That’s where I want it. The brush barely touches the surface, and when it does: potent blue. Potent blue.

Layer one is messy and it’s rough. It needs to be.

If you sit in one corner of a work and etch away, slowly mapping it out, there’s no energy. No zest. No punch. There’s no show without Punch. The first coat needs to be like a well-lived life: wild, thrashing, crazy and colourful.

You can always zero in on what you want later. Any time is a good time to start building in your composition and details. But the only time you can go truly wild is at the start. Well, that’s not entirely true. You can go wild later in life, a hundred per cent. It’s just easier at the start.

So layer one has to be wild. A horse let out of the float into a new paddock. A kid in gumboots finding the deepest puddle on the farm. And then, quietly, you have to give it a chance to see where it can go.

There’s a writer’s idea I love. At the very start of a book, you have total freedom. Every sentence after that has to follow the one before, until near the end the conclusion almost writes itself. A painting is a lot like that. Those first big dirty blobs and black lines gain control of the world, and you can spend the rest of your time wrestling back the control you handed over in the first ten seconds.

That’s not a reason to be timid. It’s a reason to be generous with that first wild layer, because it’s going to boss you around for the rest of the painting. Make it a boss you like.

Most of the time my technique is wet on dry. The paint’s wet, the surface is dry. Very basic, very easy, zero prep. You kick straight into it and see how it goes. With acrylics I’ll sometimes mix a little water in to speed up the drying, rather than adding a chemical.

Bob Ross built an empire on wet on wet. When you watch him and the strokes all look so wet and juicy and perfect, what’s actually happening is that before he started, he put a whole coat of white paint over the canvas. Everything’s already wet, so there are no dry, gritty strokes; it’s all full intensity. You can complete a work in twenty to forty-five minutes that way. His landscapes were carefully planned. Ours are not. We go wild.

I’ve done it too. A massive canvas at Lake Tarawera, painted white first, a wet-on-wet technique. Once the cream went all over the surface, every stroke went on smooth and sexy. Not dry. Because if you paint a lush, moist environment with dry, scratchy strokes, it doesn’t look moist and perky and vibrant. It looks, well, dry. Wet on dry is for deserts.

And if you want detail? Twenty minutes on YouTube once a day. Watch a few Bob Ross lessons. By the end of the year you’ll be able to paint horses and faces and ears and mouths and sunsets. Detail really isn’t that hard. What’s hard is capturing feelings. Different worlds.

When I’m laying in a sky, I keep the strokes cohesive. I don’t want to say all in the same direction, but there’s a cohesion in the direction of the brush strokes. Without it you don’t get the idea of a smooth, balanced, beautiful sky, or a sunset.

And keep the brush loaded. I like the brush wet. The paint has to look wet. Dry brushing celebrates the surface you’re scuffing across. Wet paint celebrates the medium you’re painting with. And if you’re painting water, a wet brush is basically a cheat code. If the brush doesn’t stay wet, the water won’t look wet. That shouldn’t be rocket science.

Then I’ll contradict myself again. Sometimes a little dry brushing unlocks pockets of texture a wet brush simply can’t get to. You need a mixture. Thick strong strokes, smaller intricate strokes, wet strokes, dry strokes. Without that you deny the painting something. Bob Ross liked wet. I mostly like a brush that drags out a bit dry. A lot of artists do some parts wet and some dry, and that’s okay.