Main Course

Works take twelve layers on average. That’s what I tell collectors before I start, and it’s true more often than not.

Twelve layers is twelve weather systems passing over one hill. Each one leaves something behind. Some leave a lot.

It’s hard to judge a work in the window of the first four or five layers. You really need to get into the nitty-gritty. Seven or eight layers in, that’s when it starts to hit its straps. Is that what the kids are saying? I think that’s what boomers say.

So don’t panic in layer three. Layer three is the teenager. It’s moody and it’s loud and it doesn’t look like anything yet. Let it grow up.

You can’t do a landscape in a single layer anyway. Same old, same old. Every time.

In the early layers I flatten the paint out. And because those layers are flat, I can go over them and change anything I like, any time I feel.

Then, at the second layer, I start going in with more impasto. Thicker. And with impasto, there’s a commitment you make with every stroke. The stroke says: this stays here. In the end result, physically, you can’t work over me. Before, everything was negotiable. Now every lump of paint is a promise.

This is the one people don’t believe, so I’ll say it again. Everything on the canvas right now is only going to stop you from discovering everything the work can be.

Yes, you need to know where the composition sits so you know where the next stroke goes. But you don’t need to understand the next stroke in relation to every other stroke. Every stroke needs to exist in its own weird little universe, completely separate from whatever any other stroke is doing.

There comes a point when the wild strokes have to stop. Now is not the time for chaotic strokes; it’s the time for calm, collected action that brings the character out. You can still have fun. But the strokes become methodical and intentional, a few at a time, around the eyelashes, pulling one line in to slim the face.

And keep the pops coming. Little pockets of red. Splashes and lumps of thick paint, right up the top.

People ask how long a painting takes. It’s hard to judge art on time. Say we’re trying to get a hundred good strokes. It doesn’t matter if we did five hundred to get them. It’s wrong to call the other four hundred useless. Sometimes you’re so tied up in the journey of the painting that time stops being the point.

Some take a lot of time. That’s part of their journey. You don’t rush a river.

I’ll tell you how bad I am at this. One commission was finished. Framed. Boxed. Ready to leave the studio. And I tore open the box to add a few more layers. I sent the collector a video and an apology for their unbelievable patience. I wanted it to be perfect.

Twelve layers on average. And sometimes the box gets opened.

Every painting I make is two paintings.

Come right up close and it’s a bomb site. An absolute mess. Wild, messy, abrupt, weird, sporadic paint. Ridiculous levels of colour. Stand back, all the way back across the room, and those crazy colours become a mountain range with sun on it.

That’s the game. Up close, texture. From a distance, a sensible impression of mountains. And the more layers we put on, the more both of them show up.

The best thing about building curiosity into a landscape is what happens as you walk towards it. At twenty feet you see the blacks and the structure really clearly. At ten feet things start to feel slightly different. In the middle zone you see blues and purples. Right up close, I see the yellows, the Naples. It gives you an experience through depth.

That’s why landscapes are fun in hallways, or anywhere you can sit both close and far away. And it’s why the phone camera never quite does it justice. If you’re here in person, you’ll see.

Here’s a rule I hold myself to. Do I want a painting a few people understand, or one most people can understand? I want one the majority of people can understand if they give it ten seconds.

That’s the magic line. If you studied it for ten seconds, would you get everything that’s happening? Longer than that, in the world we live in, and you’ve drifted into a realm too abstract for most people to appreciate. You’ll tolerate a reel from a friend that’s eight to ten seconds. A two-minute reel is too much to ask.

You can’t hang a painting at a dinner party and say, “Stare at this for three minutes, don’t talk.” It’s more fun if, in the flow of conversation, someone glances up and goes, “Oh, wow.” And then keeps noticing little Easter eggs in it for years. The overall picture is like the abstract at the top of a scientific paper. The detail is the paper.

People say: is this impressionism? Expressionism? Abstract? Honestly, definitions tend to box art in. It’s quite a painterly style. Art with paint. A bit wild, a bit messy, most of all fun. If you want to find more of it online, search impressionism.

But here’s why I lean that way. With a lot of realism, the painting says: you must see this. It’s a one-way conversation. Impressionism says: I’ve tried to capture an impression of the subject; what do you see? You’re entitled to say, “I don’t see anything.” Just don’t use that as a reason to say you don’t like it.

A focal point should catch your eye and then let it go. Your eyes want to go to it, and then immediately cascade off and enjoy everything else in the picture. If the focal point grows too big, too strong, you have to pull it back down.

Once, painting Pennsylvania, I put a mountain bang in the centre. A nod to the Keystone State: a keystone is the stone in the middle of a Roman arch that holds the whole thing up, no glue, nothing else. Rules are there to be broken when you’ve got a reason.

You don’t need to draw two dogs. You don’t need a horizon. All that is stupid. You just need to see what you see, feel what you feel, and put it on the canvas. Do that in enough little strokes, enough times, and a picture can’t help but emerge. Like a face surfacing in a pond as the ripples settle.

One thing you can do right now with your phone. Take a photo of a painting, especially an up-close abstract face, and turn it upside down, or on its side. You can still see the face, sort of, but suddenly there are new forms: bulging hills, terraces, dark shapes doing new jobs. If you love it that way, wonderful. If you hate it, you’re more than okay to hang it the right way up.

I love landscapes. Don’t get me wrong. But I love, love, love portraits. Fall in love, get romantic, get weird about portraits. Faces, especially elderly faces: the wrinkles, the colour, the strokes. Compositionally, they’re one of my favourite things in the world.

You capture something in eyes, in a person, in character, in an up-close face, that you don’t get anywhere else. I feel paint does more there than any other medium possibly could. That’s why Van Gogh’s self-portraits are so compelling. In his face you can see the beauty of his art form, and the pain in his eyes, and the way he studies himself.

For my own portraits I zoom right up, so the eyes touch each side of the canvas and the mouth is cut off at the bottom. Why? It’s my portrait, and I’m not much of a fan of mouths. So I crop the mouth out, along with the ears and the top of the head, and focus hard on the eyes and the nose. It gives me a massive zoom, and a one-to-one composition that fits the surface I’ve prepared.

A giant face is a giant statement. If you buy a big face for your house, make no mistake, you’re making a statement. I love that. But if the colours in that face sink back, it can be scary. A big face needs big energy. One I’d worked on fell back into its deep blues and lost its zing, so we went straight back in with yellows and vermilion for power and punch.

When you start judging your picture too much, do me a favour. Look at the reference, the picture you’re pulling inspiration from, sixty per cent of the time. Sixty per cent on the image, not on the canvas.

Look at the canvas too much and you’ll judge where you are. It’s like riding a bike, or a horse. You look where you’re going, not where you are. Look at where you are and you fall right then and there. A painting is no different. Look at where you are instead of where you’re going, and you’ll never get further than the current mess.

Here’s a test. Halfway through, one of my faces is a mess. Chaotic strokes. There’s nothing in it. It’s wild and messy. And yet you look at it and pull a face out: eyes, nose, cheeks, brow. That’s pareidolia, seeing a face in the nebulous. There’s a page I follow called something like Things That Look Like Faces, and it’s nothing but that.

Sometimes all the colours in a reference look medium grey, and it takes a bit more artistic eye to spot where to go dark and where to send light. With photo manipulation, you can build extra contrast into the reference so your eyes don’t have to strain. It’s not cheating. It just stops you straining your eyes while you paint. Totally okay.

Animals teach this hardest. Painting two retrievers in the water, their eyes were so bold and dark that I kept over-focusing on them. But the real dark points weren’t in the faces. They were below the dogs, in the shadows cast in the water, and in the tufts around the neck. You look at a picture like that and you see dog faces. You can’t help it. To capture the dogs, you have to ignore the faces and keep hunting the shadow values.

In that painting, the water and the reflections made up eighty per cent of the picture. So that’s where most of our time went. And because of that, the dogs came forward.

When I paint someone’s dog, the goal isn’t a likeness. It’s the character. One commission was a series of three paintings of one dog, for his dad, to capture his character uniquely. Early strokes with a bit of definition and bold colour. Then, as it goes on: flair, love, companionship, vitality, energy, all inside the strokes. Keep it fast, furious and wild, and keep the transparency in every layer so nothing disappears.

And with people: someone in the chat once asked me to paint them. The most gorgeous thing about you, the thing I’d love to paint most, is your personality. What makes you actually you.