The Artof Painting

This book is me. Each word has been wrestled, tooth and nail, from the bosom of my soul. Ripped from its secluded garden of comfort and thrust into light. My greatest fears, on stage like a muzzled, clawless bear at a circus. Laid bare like a hand of cards, gently placed on the table.

And the cards are paint-stained. Of course they are. Thumbprints of ultramarine on the ace. A smear of Naples yellow across the king’s face like sunrise caught on a fencepost. I couldn’t keep them clean if I tried, and I’ve stopped trying.

I'm Seb. "Dad, nerd, artist, and just a generally happy-go-lucky guy." My style, in my own list: "Fun, wild, bubbly, loose, free, primal, raw and fun."

The question I ask before any painting:

"Over the next 20 years, is this work spreading love, joy and connection? Yes? Let's do it."

Twenty giant glass panels stood outside our beach house at Mount Maunganui, and every single morning five-year-old me attacked them.

Cheap tempera-like paint. Every idea a small boy could imagine, slapped onto glass like a church window built by a lunatic. And every evening my mother came out with the garden hose and rinsed the lot away.

Paint. Wash. Paint. Wash. Sun up, sun down. Like the tide arguing with a sandcastle and neither of them minding who wins.

I didn’t know it then, but that was the best art school I ever went to. Nothing was precious. Nothing was permanent. Tomorrow there’d be clean glass, and clean glass is the most generous thing in the world. It says: again. Go on. Again.

My mother hates it when I say this, but she’s the reason I paint.

She had a philosophy about kids, and it was a quiet, radical one. Don’t make the child into what you want. Figure out who the child already is, and then pour fuel on it. Three brothers. The oldest is a lawyer. The youngest is a mathematician. I’m the one with paint on his knees. She noticed I loved clay. She noticed I loved paint. She noticed that my hands wanted to make things and my eyes couldn’t stop drinking colour, and she grew that like a gardener grows a tomato vine, stake by stake, tie by tie.

The Gowers came to New Zealand from Cornwall. John Gower made the journey, and the record wrote him down as profession: agricultural. Six or seven generations of farmers after that. Mud, sheep, stubbornness, the long patience of grass.

My father was a farmer too, until deer recovery pulled him up into helicopters. Once he was flying, we weren’t on the farm so often, and that’s the crack in the fence where the artist leaked through. I swapped tractors, shearing and chainsaws for brushes, canvas and feelings. My parents took it on the chin like it was the most natural thing in the world. My father backed me without blinking. My mother, I believe, is the smartest person on the planet.

The farm never left, though. It creeps into everything I paint. The patience. The weather. The way you learn to read a sky for rain. The way you know that nothing grows if you stand over it shouting.

It’s not easy to pick the tools back up once you’ve put them down. I know. I put mine down for a long, ridiculous time.

Somewhere between the glass panels and manhood I decided art wasn’t a masculine pursuit. I was on a quest to become a man, and the brush didn’t fit in the holster. So I shoved it in a drawer. I shoved the singing in there too, and the dancing, and the silly geeky bits, and I built myself a disguise. A whole guise of a man, stiff as a new saddle. And I got smaller inside it. I was trying to prove something to myself, and the weight of that sat on my shoulders like a wet sack of chaff, and on the shoulders of everyone near me.

Ten years. Ten years MIA while the paint dried in the tubes.

I did study art. Of course I dropped out. I did the first year of art school, then finished a degree in art history and philosophy instead. Straight A’s. Good boy. And it was dull. Easy and barren, like a paddock in a drought where everything technically grows and nothing’s alive.

Art for art’s sake. Do this, do that. No why. And art without a why is a plumber making pipes and hoping they turn out meaningful. Even the wildest expression needs a purpose. A dancer doesn’t have to hit a chalk mark on the floor, but she steps out there to do something.

Steve Jobs described dreams better than anyone: a whisper you’ll miss if you don’t listen. They’re rarely the thundering odyssey Disney gave Hercules, glorious as that is. A dream is a pebble on the sand of your mind. Throw it as far as you like, into the surf, over the dunes. It comes back. It sits under your feet. If you listen, and if you’re lucky, one day you bend down and pick it up. If it isn’t too late, and sometimes it is, you hold it. You walk the beach with it warm in your fist.

My mistake was thinking I had to find the thing I was good at the hard way, like everyone else. I’d get there through stubbornness, through blood and grit. Half true. But I wrote off the things that came easy, the things that ran like water, because they didn’t hurt enough to count.

How dare I put down a paintbrush? Have you seen me with one of those? Ten years while it could have been moving people. The audacity. If you’ve got the thing that brings this world the most happiness, you owe it to the rest of us to pick it up. And if you can’t do it for us, do it for you.

For years I’d been all eyes and no hands. Seeing everything, doing nothing, building opinions I’d never act on. Then I swung to the other end: all hands, no eyes. I lay in the back of a little white station wagon, damp and bruised, hands bitten raw by mosquitoes, and felt nothing but the satisfaction of being in it. I was the action. Blood running through the veins of the thing.

Which is more hollow? Never knowing, or never doing? Honestly, I loved both. I wanted both. Painting turned out to be the one place I could have both at once: the eye that sees the gorge and the hand that throws the blue.

It took a lot of living to see I don’t need to prove anything to anyone. I only need to live in a way that would make the five-year-old me proud, and the seventy-year-old me look back and nod. That version of me makes art, and shares it.

It’s not easy to pick the tools back up. So if you’ve just done it, congratulations. That’s a massive thing. Truly.

What made me an artist again? I was happy, actually. That’s the twist. I was working for a family restaurant chain, running operations, and enjoying it. Strict. To the point. All the things.

Then the lockdowns came, one after another, and I could feel people going numb. You could almost hear it, a country-wide hum of televisions in dim rooms. Isolation creeping in under the doors like cold air. The light going out of people the way a pilot light goes out in a draughty house, quietly, and nobody notices until the water runs cold.

I thought: I can’t let that happen to my family.

It started, like all great art movements, with my brother trying to impress a girl.

I hadn’t painted in years. But he needed to impress this girl, so out came the paint, and we painted. And somewhere in my late twenties it hit me, hard, a bucket of cold water over the head: I’d built a disguise, a whole guise of a man, and it was ick. I love painting. I love singing. I love dancing. I like being silly and geeky. And suddenly I was starving for expression like a man who’d forgotten to eat for a decade.

Second lockdown. I set up a live stream so my brothers, scattered round the world, could paint with me. I left it on public. That was the mistake. Arguably one of the best things I’ve ever done.

I was setting up a restaurant after a lockdown, before heading back to head office in the North Island. I’d finish around nine at night, pack everything away, make myself a cocktail, put my headphones on and wander out to the storage shed. Four or five hours of paint. A small part of me didn’t want those moments to disappear. I wanted them to live a little longer, like a candle you cup your hand around.

I’d always thought painting was selfish. Something I did for me, in the dark, for my own sanity. I had to get slapped over the head before I saw it differently.

As a kid I dreamed about Picasso and Van Gogh. I’d stare at their work and their lives, wanting to be them, and quietly filed the whole thing under pipe dream.

It took incredible people to grab that pipe dream by the ear and drag it out into daylight. If strangers hadn’t felt happy, and demanded more, I’d be in another job right now, ignoring a whisper a five-year-old started. That kid would grin like an idiot if he saw what his craft does for people. His grin, and the people on the other end of the canvas, are the fuel. When I look at a canvas that way, it stops being about me at all.

Let me be honest, though. I’m floundering. I have no idea what I’m doing. This is a journey reviewed in hindsight, and I’m selling you the romance. Take the romance. It’s real. Just know there was mud under it.

In the early days I attacked canvas with no plan. Raw shapes, hues and wild ideas running feral across the surface like a mob of unbroken horses. I love every one of those works. I’d step back and wonder whether anyone else would see what I saw. To an onlooker: insanity. To me: the corner of a diamond poking out of the dirt. I couldn’t stop scraping.

Nobody was watching. Just the people who loved me, saying things like, “Keep going. That’s kinda funky,” and, “You’re a better person right now. Keep doing what you’re doing.” Were they talking about the art or about me? I still don’t know. Does it matter? In that soft little room I carved a method. Colours, strokes, expression, until it turned into something other people could stand in front of and feel.

Then the love came in from every direction, like the tide coming in over a flat beach, quiet and enormous. Every new person touched by a painting is a gift. The passion you feel looking at one is the same passion it was painted with. That’s not mysticism. You can see a happy stroke. You can see a frightened one.

A happy ending, but only after a scrap. Here are the juiciest wrong turns. No wallowing, no bragging.

I didn’t know what to charge. I was so excited someone saw the same beauty I did that I’d literally hand them the work and say, “I really like you. Have it for free.”

I’d take a commission and then crumble, sure they’d hate it, and drag the painting out for months to dodge an embarrassment that was never going to arrive. Fear is a slow painter. It does one stroke a week and calls it caution.

One more thing, and I want you to take this one personally. Maybe you’ve got a job on the side. Maybe you’re a plumber, maybe you drive a taxi, maybe you wait tables. It feels weird to say you’re an artist. You say, “I dabble.” That’s fear of judgement wearing a polite little hat.

Take the hat off. Stand up in front of people and say it: I sing. I dance. I make art. That should be a thing of pride.

Before the first stroke, there’s the ground. The bit nobody claps for. The concrete under the house, the tilled soil before the seed.

You’ve got your substrate, wood, Masonite, canvas, and you add a priming layer: a gesso coat, or a rabbit-skin glue coat. Something that lets the paint last and stay saturated and perky on the surface.

Take New Zealand timber. Lovely. But paint it raw and two things happen. First, the paint seeps into the wood and loses its potency and colour, like rain soaking into dry ground. Second, and worse, you shorten the life of the paint. All that’s needed is some white first.

Gesso differs from ordinary acrylic paint in two ways. No fillers, so nothing to weaken the paint. And it usually uses chalk, which makes the finished surface a bit more absorbent. Think of a sponge. Rather than running through into the wood, the paint sits on top and holds.

Someone asked about canvas tightness once, and I’ll tell you what I told them. Your canvas needs to sound like a drum. It must sound like a drum. If it doesn’t, it’s loose and flappy and won’t react well to your brush.

Here’s why. The brush flexes. With a canvas, the canvas flexes too. When the brush touches it, the canvas moves slightly, and there’s this dance that happens between brush and canvas. You push a little, it bounces back a little, and everything looks sleeker, more fluid, smoother. With Masonite you have to be more delicate, because the brush moves and the board won’t.

Paint right around the edges. If you go all the way around, you leave your options open for framing later, and if a floating frame goes on, you still see the paint wrapping round the side like a wave curling over a rock.

If you want thickness without spending a fortune on paint, there’s modelling paste. Artist’s cement, basically. It adds extreme thickness by default. Gesso primer in the mix can thicken things too, if you feel it’s necessary.

The studio matters as well. Mine is a shed with one whole side that opens. It’s watertight, but two things keep art safe: temperature and humidity. It doesn’t need to be a gallery or a wine cellar. It does need to stay within a band. You can’t get too moist, and you can’t get too hot. Cold’s kind of fine. Thermometers, dehumidifiers, and an honest eye on the weather.

And keep the space clean. I painted the studio floor dark, partly so every bit of dust would show and keep me on my toes. Messy workspace, messy mind. Big believer in that.

People ask why I mix on plates instead of a palette. I like plates. Porcelain plates are lovely to mix on. Disposable ones are good too, because when one’s done you take it away and there’s another waiting underneath, like the next clean page in a notebook.

But that’s not really why. I spent many, many hours in many, many years serving lovely faces in restaurants. The plate is my “don’t forget your roots”. You’d be surprised how much of waiting tables applies to painting. I can’t think of a single example right now. I’m sure there’s a bunch.

And first things first, every session: a nice clean plate. Numero uno. Liquid medium straight onto a flat plate will slush all over the place, so go easy, especially if you’re not on the grass.

My trusty brush is a shape that tapers to one end. It gives you detail and coverage in the same tool, a fat body and a sharp toe, like a good dog that can herd and also find a single dropped glove. Mine is now looking like a proper mess. We’ll have some fun with it anyway.

For my thirty-second birthday, my uncle gave me one of the most incredible gifts I could ask for: handmade paintbrushes. New Zealand timber, and you can see the change of the heartwood running through the handle. I was so precious about keeping them nice that I started with the square one.

Then there’s the monster. A brush so big it looks like a broom that’s been to art school. One load on that and even dry-brushing, the saturation pops with unstoppable power, because we’ve made the paint ourselves and haven’t used fillers.

I invented a brush once. I called it the Cooper brush, after my daughter, because I’d been out in the shed with her that morning. It’s a hatchet-style brush that comes off at an angle. When I get really close to the canvas, everything gets annoyingly cramped and there’s no grace in a stroke. So I cut the top off a hammer and the top off one of my brushes and screwed them together.

A prototype. If it works, fantastic. If it doesn’t, no harm, no foul. That’s how you should treat every tool. Including the ones you think you can’t live without.

Some housekeeping that’s really painting. Put your lids back on, always. I’m still learning that one. Wear a painting uniform: messy pants and a nice clean shirt, op-shop if you can. Sunscreen if you’re outside, even if it makes you look like the Abominable Snowman for ten minutes while it sinks in. Water nearby. Coffee if you must, but on a hot day, water.

And keep a bit of poster paint around if you have a toddler. When my daughter wanders in and wants to join, I can hand her a tub of poster paint and she thinks she’s joining me. Gaslighting 101. Only joking. These days she paints with egg tempera too. The kid has standards.

Every painter needs a cave. Mine started as a restaurant storage shed. Now it’s a chicken coop.

Back in 1981 the white wall behind me and the floor I stand on would have held a commercial number of chickens. The only reason I know is the council plans: it was approved as a commercial chicken coop. No chickens in here anymore. It’s all above board. It’s all art now, with a door that creaks.

Massive kudos to Shelby for letting me convert the whole shed into a studio.

The most important thing about this studio is that it’s a shed. Three walls and barn doors. That gives you a massive space to work in. It also gives you an airflow problem.

So there are two holes in the back wall that run through to extractors, and three fans, a little bit dinky but they work, pushing air one way while the extractors suck it out as fast as they can. Between them we’re moving somewhere around two hundred and fifty cubic metres a minute. I still want to get a smoke flare and set it off at different points in the studio, to see physically what the air is doing, because it might not be as good as I think it is.

I painted the floor light grey. Didn’t work. Medium grey. Better. Then I wanted to go black.

Black will keep me on my toes. Every little bit of dust will show, and I’ll have to keep cleaning. This needs to be a semi dust-free environment so paint can actually dry, so it doesn’t matter that it’s a really dark surface. Unconventional for a shed. Messy workspace, messy mind. I’m a big believer in that.

White on the inside. Black on the outside. We’ll see what comes to fruition.

In the studio, I love the paints laid out perfectly. Blues in their different hues, yellows, greens, purples, all your whites, all your blacks, beautifully laid out. If your paints aren’t organised, you end up using colours as compromises instead of the one you were actually looking for.

My problem is going between the studio and the outdoors. Out in nature, rain’s coming, there’s wind and there are mosquitoes, and you want to get the job done efficiently, and you’d never go out there without all your colours. So the box comes back a mess. Then I lay it all out again.

There’s a moment, as paint gets really thick on the surface, when instead of making ground you’re just moving it around. Like porridge. And while I love porridge, porridge in painting form is not so great. That’s when I move to another painting and let this one dry.

Loki is a golden retriever. When he was ten months old he was gigantic and the best-behaved puppy you’d want, and very good with Cooper, which was one of our biggest worries. They say dogs mould themselves into what a family needs. I reckon that’s what Loki’s done. The neighbours’ dogs bark, and he never joins in.

He has the most expensive dog bed you’ll ever see: a giant slab of Italian amber glass, three and a half metres long and a metre and a half wide. It was an insurance job. Someone smashed the base and was selling the top off on Marketplace. No one wanted it without the base. Except me. The plan is for it to run through the middle of the studio as a table.

And the plate I mix on today is French glass from an op shop. No one else wanted that either. Its last home is the art workshop. Everything in here is something nobody else wanted, given a second life. Maybe that’s the point.

Around the studio there’s a whole bunch of fruit trees. Massive olive trees, with apparently a commercial number of olives on the way. Feijoas, I think. Definitely peaches. Pears.

And on the roof, an old-school fire extinguisher I’d never seen before in my life, which lets out a reservoir of water. That has to come off at some stage. Water all over the art would be just about as bad as fire.

What I want is "standing in front of a giant canvas and going a little crazy on it with a full spectrum of fun, wild colors."

"My naughty 4: Oils, Acrylics, Egg Tempera & Gouache"

If you remember one thing from this whole book, make it this: paint is just a vehicle. A taxi. The passenger is pigment.

Everything else in the tube, the oil, the plastic, the gum, the water, the fillers, is the car, the seats, the fluffy dice hanging off the mirror. The colour you fall in love with is the person in the back seat. So when you buy paint, think of it like buying liquid pigment. How much passenger are you actually getting?

One of the things I love most about painting is making sure my pigment load is through the roof. I don’t like shallow pigments. I want those particles as juicy and thick as they can possibly be, packed in like sardines at a rugby test.

Student paint will break your heart quietly. The tube looks cheaper. It is cheaper. But you’re buying a tube of water. You don’t get the kick. You squeeze it out, push it around, and it lies there on the canvas like a wet cardigan, all good intentions and no warmth.

I’ll show you what I mean. Pop the lid. Ready? Yee-ha. Homemade red oil paint. And when I say homemade, don’t think lower quality. It’s literally just the pigment with linseed oil in the blender. All the beauty of a paint, none of the nasties.

Beside it, the expensive stuff. Michael Harding. As expensive as oils can get. Beautiful. But a lot of off-the-shelf paint, to make it last the distance on a shelf and survive, has things added to it that you might not want near your lungs.

If you want the heaviest pigment of all, there’s gouache. Gouache paint has the thickest, heaviest pigment particles going. I combine gouache with egg, and the light feels like it’s coming from inside the paint itself. Look at it wet. Really wet. And yet the colour is so intense it’s as if you’d primed and painted a house wall twice.

Bigger particles make paint more opaque. And here’s the thing about shine. Some people love the gloss you get off acrylics and oils, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But if you want raw colour, you hit a problem when the surface gets too reflective. You stop seeing colour. You see the reflection of light, like chrome reflecting the whole room back at you, and the essence of the colour gets lost in the glare.

I used to love gloss and satin. I still do. But I’m falling for matte. Matte gets a bad name because usually we meet it at a cheap print shop, a flat photo that feels a bit dead. That’s not the same as matte with an extreme pigment load. Very few of us have ever stood in front of that. It’s like hearing a song you’ve only ever heard through a phone speaker, and then hearing it live.

A practical one. Buy about one tube of white for every four tubes of colour. Four tubes of colour get the colour onto the scene. The white lets you keep splicing it back towards the light.

And put your lids back on. I say this to myself more than to you. Every stream, I’m trying to get out of the bad habit of letting good paint dry out in the open air like washing left on the line in a storm.

You don’t need fancy brushes. I mean it. I use cheap synthetic flats with long handles. A 10, a 16, whatever. Soft but not too soft. Hard but not too hard. Find one that works for you. That’s the best brush.

Spend it on the pigment. The passenger. Always the passenger.

Ultramarine blue. Oh, baby.

Look at the powder. Very, very finely ground, and it looks like it’s glowing, like someone crushed the deep end of a swimming pool on a summer afternoon and tipped it into a jar. It’s so fine you must be careful not to breathe it in. It gets into your lungs and does damage. Mask up. Gorgeous things can still bite.

There was a time when the real version of this blue was literally worth its weight in gold. Ground-up rock, crystal, carried a very long way. Then the French put out a bounty. Someone, anyone, figure out how to make ultramarine. Sort it out. And a Frenchman did. That’s why so many tubes say French ultramarine blue. It’s a little tip of the hat, painted onto every tube, to the man who found a way to make it without the mountain.

If you want one blue, get ultramarine and you’ll be fine. That’s the only blue you really need. Everything after that is a footnote. Weird analogy coming: ultramarine is the Plato of the blue world, and every other blue is a footnote to Plato.

The footnotes are lovely, mind you. Cerulean is your chill blue, the one lying in a hammock. Pacific blue is a grey blue I lean on a lot. Phthalo green is always a banger. French turquoise, similar to ultramarine and synthetically made, is a wonderful, wonderful colour that I warmed to more and more every stroke. And ultramarine into a brilliant magenta gives you an ultramarine purple, more vibrant than a royal purple, not as dark, with more pop to it. Great combo.

Is ultramarine still my favourite? For years, yes. Best colour the world has to offer, I’d say. These days I’ll admit a soft spot for baby blue. Me and Snoop Dogg, apparently. Love can shift. That’s allowed.

Yellow is the primary colour that wants to be used the least. Raw, bold, primary yellow is a lot. It’s the guy at the party who’s had three drinks and found the karaoke machine. On its own I’ll mostly use just the reds and the blues, and the yellows splice into everything else, into greens, into mustards, into skin.

So I dance between two yellows. Iridescent gold, and Naples yellow.

Naples yellow is much more of a tan than a yellow. Is it the best colour? That’s a stretch. Is it the best yellow? Definitely. Hands down. No other shade comes close. If you’re looking at your art wondering why it lacks that little kicker of realism, that natural, beautiful feel, drop the yellows completely and dive into Naples yellow. Without changing anything else, the whole picture settles, like a room when someone finally turns off the fluorescent light and lights a lamp.

Here’s a trap that catches people. Someone on Facebook asked me: doesn’t paint no longer have cadmium in it? Aren’t they all safe now?

You’d think so. It’s not. Unless it says cadmium-free, it’s probably full of cadmium, for the yellows and the reds. For blues, they typically use cobalt. If it says cadmium, cobalt or manganese on the packet, it contains that heavy metal, because that’s what makes the colour so beautiful. We haven’t got around that yet.

And then there’s the unsung hero I keep coming back to. Neutral grey.

Titanium white is the most exciting colour of all, my key colour. Neutral grey is the second most exciting, and I swear they get more exciting after that. Neutral grey contrasts with saturation and lets everything else stand out. It doesn’t want the spotlight. It holds the ladder while the reds climb up and wave. A real team player. Where would we be without a bit of neutral grey? Lord only knows.

"Paint is just the bait. Light is the fish."

Colour isn't really in anything. A lemon swallows most of the light that hits it and bounces back the yellow bit. Your eye catches that and your brain shouts "yellow". Colour is light, stuff and you, all at once. Change any one of them and the colour changes. That's why colour isn't simple, and why your eyes get a vote.

Your phone makes colour by adding light: red, green and blue. Red light plus green light makes yellow. All three at full make white. This is additive colour. More light, brighter.

Paint doesn't make light. It eats it. Each pigment swallows some of the white light and gives back the leftovers. Mix two paints and each one eats its share, so less comes back. This is subtractive colour. More mixing, darker and duller.

That's why a photo of a painting never looks right, and why the turquoise on your phone isn't in any tube. One is a lightbox, the other is a plate. Judge paint in the light it'll live in.

"Sometimes the sun drops behind a big gooey dark-blue cloud halfway through a session and the whole painting glazes over in front of you like the eyes of a tired dog."

Printers use cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK), subtractive like paint. Dyes dissolve and stain. Pigments are particles that sit. A peacock feather or a soap bubble has no pigment at all: tiny structures bend the light. That's structural colour.

Let me teach you the colour wheel, and then let me tell you why it lies.

Red, yellow, blue. Mix the blue with the red and you get purple. The yellow with the red and you get orange, more of a Venetian orange with the reds I use, but orange. The yellow with the blue and you get green. Simple as a nursery rhyme.

Now the fascinating bit: complementary colours. They sit on opposite sides of the wheel. What’s opposite green? Red. Green and red, the colours of Christmas. Opposite blue? Orange. Opposite yellow? Purple. Sports teams and logos pair these up all the time, purple and yellow, because they stand out and people love them. Once I tell you about them you’ll start spotting them all over the place.

That’s the science. Here’s the rebellion.

Some people approach colour as a science, and it feels yuck to me, because too often emotion completely contradicts the science about what actually looks good. Orange doesn’t go with blue. Yellow doesn’t go with purple. Mash them together and they look like soup. Disgusting combinations. And the notion that they “complement” each other? That’s where the science falls down.

Yes, I just taught you the rule and then kicked its legs out. Both are true. That’s colour. A wild horse that will eat from your hand one morning and kick the gate off its hinges the next.

My favourite book on colour is The Secret Lives of Colour. It tells the stories behind each colour. When it was discovered. Why it was so valuable at certain points in history. When it got democratised, cheap and available to everyone. Royal purple, ground up, expensive, only royals could afford it. Same with blues. Why Naples yellow is called Naples yellow. The point of that book is that it makes you less clinical about colour and more romantic about it. And once you’re romantic about colour, you make your own emotional decisions. That’s when your art becomes meaningful. Not because a wheel told you orange goes with blue.

Grass doesn’t always have to be green. Paint grass just green and it gets boring. It needs more of the rainbow in it. I’ll put yellow straight on top of green so it never stays perfect yellow; it splices in, goes a little bit mustardy, a little bit greeny, and in those early layers it adds warmth to the picture, that natural power coming back.

And whatever you do, don’t use just white for a cloud. Clouds are very rarely pure white. They look pure white against the rest of the world, but the cloud itself isn’t white. Look at a cloud right now. There’s grey in it. There’s probably red in it, a reddish grey. There’s blue, obviously, because the sky is blue. Pink might be playing a role. Explore the rest of the spectrum, or you just don’t get it.

Green, by the way, might be the best colour in nature and the hardest to capture. Like a diamond. Think of light shimmering off the sea. You can’t bottle the sea. If you could, it’d be a diamond.

People ask me: why not more realistic colours?

Here’s my answer. Take a photo of a face and turn the saturation on one colour all the way up. Random highlights of blue or orange or red start popping out of the skin. So was there no blue in the face? Or a little bit? Or should the whole face be blue?

The colour was always there. Hiding. A lot of the colour I put down gets covered up later, but it needs to be under there, in the underlying layers. There are pockets, flares of red in the environment. Even a red I’ve been bagging on all session, I’ll put in the underlayers, so when we get towards the end it pops out from underneath like an ember in the ashes when you blow on it.

Blue is like a predecessor to black. Get blue all over the surface and the painting only gets more fun.

And black. Black is a heavy hitter. Before any other colour, I’d talk about the damage black can do. Blue and red do amazing things, but nothing has the impact on a piece of artwork that black has. Sometimes even regular paint black doesn’t cut the mustard and you need an ink black, something that sits with incredible potency on the surface and just jumps out.

But be careful. Lay your blacks on thick, and if other colours touch them while they’re wet, those lovely pastel tones turn into shades of grey and black. Let the blacks dry. Then come back.

I’m a colour guy. If you want to go black and white, charcoal and pencils are your best friend, no smell, do them wherever you like. But if you’re going to use paint, use colour.

And look at your walls. A lot of our experience of colour doesn’t come from the world around us anymore. A lot of houses, and it breaks my heart, are white and black. That’s all they are. “I’m doing it up for resale.” “I don’t trust my own taste.” So you paint the walls white, and then you wonder why your eyes hurt and why you don’t feel good. Maybe you hang one little picture. In my mind, the only way to counteract that much white is a giant, crazy, full-colour painting on the wall that really jumps out. Then you get balance.

You paid the same for paint either way. You just opted for none.

Paint is just the bait. Light is the fish.

Every colour you put down is a promise that light will come along later and keep. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the sun drops behind a big gooey dark-blue cloud halfway through a session and the whole painting glazes over in front of you like the eyes of a tired dog.

What’s nice for painting is diffuse light. Light everywhere, but not one light source as such. Obviously the sun’s over there somewhere, but the clouds in front of it scatter the light around, soft as flour.

The best is in the morning, when clouds are covering the sun and the sun’s at about a thirty-degree angle. The light’s diffused. You can examine all the colours on the canvas at once. Strong direct light hitting a glossy surface does the opposite: it turns the painting to chrome and shines it back at you, and you lose the colour in the glare.

Usually I work from dark to light. Raw umber first, often, underlining all the colours we’ll find later. Then the light climbs out of the dark the way morning climbs out of a valley.

But rules are for breaking at seven in the morning. One sunrise at Lake Tarawera, with an amazing glaze on the lake and in the sky, I did the naughty thing and started with the lake and the sky. Light colours first, moving towards the dark. Completely different from what I normally do. The light was there. I wasn’t going to make it wait.

A painting with texture and mixed finishes is never the same painting twice.

I like mixing the finishes: not all gloss, not all satin, but a combination in different spots. Then, as the light moves, some areas lose their colour completely and reflect white like chrome, and others come alive. You don’t just see the colours shift their vibe. You lose colours and gain colours as the light changes. If you’ve got a room where you can change the hue of the lights, fire red light at a painting, then blue, then orange, and the whole vibe changes. Direct light versus indirect light gives different outcomes from satin and gloss.

Paintings change their clothes

Move the sun across the day.

7amMiddayDusk

Textures do the same thing. When the light catches them, they need to stand out as the light moves around. Late in the day, as the sun drops, the shadows in the thick paint grow and completely change how certain bits look. It’s a naughty little secret you only know about if you’re there in person with the work.

So when someone asks where to hang a portrait, I say: a room with a window, where the light changes over the day. That’s a massive plus for how a work activates in a space. Put it in a basement or a study with no natural light and it’ll be more controlled, but you’ll miss a trick. If you like to control your house, that’s fine too. Change which lamps you leave on, and you’ll see it differently each time.

The more of that you can put into a painting, the better it is long term. Because even Starry Night, you can only see so many hundreds of thousands of times before it’s run its course with you. But a painting that can be reimagined in different seasons, different times of day, different lighting, different angles and distances? That takes a long time, maybe forever, to finish getting to know. Suddenly you’ve got a companion in life, not a picture you thought was nice at a farmers market.

Some sessions end because the light just gives out. One evening stream I could hardly see the canvas by the end, and the replay still looked bright. Phones see better in the dark than we do now. Sometimes I’ve had to threaten to drag out a floodlight and beam it at the work.

You can’t keep the light. That’s the whole point of painting it.

Funny story. I’ve got a syndrome, and it’s called visual snow.

Everywhere I look, everything I see has a slight electrical static over it. A faint fizz of television snow laid across the gorge, across my daughter’s face, across the canvas. All day. Every day.

You could see that as a disaster. Is it? Monet had cataracts. Beethoven went deaf. Can’t see, can’t hear. On one hand the static could drive me wild. On the other hand, it’s not like that at all. Everything glitters for me.

I developed it about six years ago now. When it started, it came on all at once, and I felt like I’d never see colour or gradients again. Like someone had pulled a fine grey veil over the world and pinned it at the corners.

But funnily enough, it completely changed the way I made art. Everything I’ve ever made that’s been shown online, everything anyone has ever seen of mine, has been made since I’ve had visual snow.

What’s the yellow stuff you put in it? Great question, my dear, dear friend. That is egg yolk.

I paint with egg tempera. It sounds weird. People picture a breakfast going badly wrong. But it’s one of the oldest ways humans have of gluing colour to a surface, and it’s the same broad family of technique Leonardo used on the Last Supper. Painters have been cracking eggs over their pigments for centuries while the rest of the world was busy inventing everything else.

Here’s my mix, and I keep it very simple. Half water, half egg yolk. Make sure the water is pure. Mine is fresh spring water from the family farm.

Then the pigment. In pure egg tempera you’d use powdered pigment straight into the egg mixture. I usually don’t, and that’s by design. I use gouache paint instead. Gouache has the same pigment in it, big fat particles of it, and best of all it comes as a paste, already combined with water. So I mix the gouache with the egg mix at about one to one. Because gouache is already a liquid, I don’t want to add too much egg.

The one catch is the gum arabic inside the gouache. So when I’m going straight egg into gouache, I don’t add any more water. Just yolk into paint. A little dollop of gouache, an equal dollop of the egg mix beside it, mix them together, and now you’ve got a buttery paint super similar to oils.

And something strange happens. Whatever colour the yolk had simply fades away. The whites in tempera can come up whiter than the whites in an oil painting. When your binder is a yellow yolk, how is that possible? I don’t know. It just is. Paint is full of these small miracles, like finding a five-dollar note in last winter’s jacket.

You’d think an egg’s an egg. No. I thought so too when I started, but the more aware I got of the way the paint moves, the clearer it became. If the chicken wasn’t healthy and happy, your paint gets this dull effect to it. A healthy, happy chicken, a beautiful fresh egg, and bang: the paint’s alive. No one’s surprised by that, right? Life in, life out.

Egg tempera dries by a different mechanism. It’s an emulsion. As the fats and proteins in the yolk bind together, they seal the pigment into a permanent film, a thin layer on top and inside.

Acrylics and oils actually yellow over time. Acrylics because they’re full of plastics. Oils because linseed oil, or even walnut oil, will just eventually yellow. Something about an egg means it doesn’t. Provided it’s kept in a safe environment, it just stays constant, for hundreds of years.

Tempera wants to be laid down in thin glazes, one after another. No thick impasto moments. Lots of individual strokes, each trying to capture its own little moment in the overall picture, cross-hatched like grass blown flat in a southerly.

That’s also why it’s a bit of a winner if you worry about paint consumption. It has so much pop, and yet you use so little of it. The only thing that could compete for economy, if you ask me, is ink.

Egg tempera is fragile. You’ve seen it. If it’s not looked after, it’s not permanent. But in that fragility there’s a kind of beauty, like a newborn baby: fragile and defenceless, and because of that, you’ll never let any harm come to it.

My daughter paints with it too. She came out to the studio, saw the colours I was using, and said, more or less, “Daddy, I don’t want my washed-out colours. I want your intensity.” So she paints with egg tempera the same way I do. Gouache and egg yolk. She can get it all over her clothes and it washes out. An egg yolk is a thing you eat. Nobody’s writing “please consume this, tastes like strawberries” on an acrylic tube. That should tell you everything.

Let’s talk about the thing nobody in the art shop mentions while they’re ringing up your oils. Fumes.

A lot of the time we say things like: we’ll make amazing art anyway, and hurt ourselves in the process, because one day we’ll be famous and then we can change. Why? Why get to where you want to go and not be the same person when you get there? That’s what solvents will do to you.

You can wear a gas mask, and some people do. But are you going to be methodical with it and wear it every single time? If not, run to the hills. Run to the hills.

So many artists say, “Oh, I use oil paints and I crack a window.” Cool. Okay. The window has been cracked. Everyone relax, the fumes are making an orderly exit out of that one window in the far left-hand corner. You’re totally safe.

No. When you’re outside, that’s the only form of ventilation that counts. Any wall of any kind is not ventilation. Outside, with a slight breeze, ideally blowing away from you, across the work, out into the paddock. That’s why a bit of wind is really good. I peg the canvas down and let the wind carry the fumes off like a sheepdog clearing a gate.

And even acrylic is plastic polymers. Can anyone tell me with a straight face that you should sniff plastic for fifty years and be fine? Doesn’t sound right, does it?

I believe some artists’ trajectories change and we say, oh, their painting evolved. Did it change? Or, over the process of making it, did they melt their frontal lobe? It’s a very tough one to know.

A lot of artists breathe in the fumes and go a little more lightheaded every stroke, and by the end it’s a wild, crazy piece and everyone says, “Oh, it’s amazing,” and the artist falls into this evil trap of having to go back into that environment to get the same magic. Please, please, please look after yourself. If you don’t worry about safety at the start and keep your frontal lobe, there won’t be an artist at all in a few years. I’m hypersensitive to fumes myself. That’s part of why I paint with egg.

Think of it like x-rays. One x-ray, you’ll be absolutely fine. Fifteen a day, every day, for forty years, and you won’t be. If painting’s going to be a bigger part of your life, the materials have to be something you can live with for decades.

I love oils. Oils love it when you add oil over oil and just keep caressing it in. They mix deliciously, like different pigments of butter spreading over warm toast. Great for a huge amount of detail.

The problem with oils is that they’re oils. They rely on linseed oil, which sits there for ages to be reworked. Dry times are what get you. I’ve got paintings out there right now made with homemade oils, which is great, no solvents or driers in them, healthier. But it’s been humid, so I’m going to be waiting for years for them to dry. Literally years. That’s the reality we live in.

Acrylics dry fast, within about twenty-four hours, and that’s their superpower and their tantrum. And here’s the controversial bit: you can get more detail from acrylics than oils, because you can make them transparent and layer them aggressively. Layer, layer, layer. Transparent, transparent, transparent. Oil detail is surface-level detail. Acrylic detail can be depth.

But acrylics have a temper. Put acrylic over acrylic while it’s still wet, wet-on-wet style, and it starts to complain. It goes dull and porridgey and overall yuck. Acrylics want you to go hard and then stop. Go hard, then stop. As soon as you notice you’re going back over areas that already have paint, no matter how much you’re in the mood, the painting is no longer in the mood for you. That’s why you keep several canvases on the go. Take one down, put another up. Outside, you only need about two hours before it’s touch-dry enough to paint over.

A lot of people will tell you: don’t mix oils and acrylics. That’s bad. There are rules, they’ll say, fat over lean and so on. Great rules. Cool.

Here’s my naughty bit. I mix oils and acrylics frequently. You’re totally fine to paint them side by side. Put one on top of the other and one dries faster than the other, and that does cause cracking. Do the wrong thing and it might never dry at all. So be careful. And never put oils down too thick under acrylics, or you’ll be waiting years.

But if you don’t mind cracking, there’s beauty in it. The paint contracts and you see the colour underneath through the cracks, like dry riverbed opening on a different colour of earth. It’s not curdling or ruining itself. Once it’s cracked, it’s stable. If you like a bit of wilderness, those rules are suggestions.

A painting is a lot like a cake. It doesn’t take much to ruin one. Salt instead of sugar and a success becomes a catastrophe. The wrong medium makes paint split, run or never dry. Know your ingredients.

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.

Squint

Hold the button. The details go. The big shapes stay.

Hold to squint

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.

Build it up

Drag through twelve layers. Hard to judge in the first five.

Layer 1 of 12Wild. Messy. Keep going.

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.

Build it up

Drag through twelve layers. Hard to judge in the first five.

Layer 1 of 12Wild. Messy. Keep going.

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.

Walk up to it

Twenty feet, ten feet, nose to the paint.

20 ftStructureNose

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.

Squint

Close your eyes a little. The details go. The big shapes stay.

Eyes openSquint

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.

Where does your eye land?

Tap the first place your eye goes. No wrong answer.

Flip it

Turn the painting over. New forms show up.

Flip

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.

Crop it like you mean it

Pick a frame. Same painting, different story.

WholeTightBraveOff-centre

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.

Values, not features

Drag the line. Colour on one side, light and dark on the other.

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.

You’d think finishing would be the easy part. It’s the hardest thing in painting. Stopping is a decision, and I’m terrible at decisions that close doors.

You do have to give work the chance to breathe. Keep thrashing paint at it and you might make changes that don’t improve it. Between layers, take your time. Sit with the work.

If you sit with it for a few days, sometimes longer, and there’s nothing you’d change, you love it just the way it is, it’s finished. But often you start seeing little moments. I’ll tweak that. That needs an adjustment. Back to the drawing board. Back to the lab.

Sometimes I’ll hang a painting up on the wall for about two days just to make sure I like where it’s at. If I do, it stays that way. If I don’t, I add the little pieces it needs.

Monet was definitely an artist in that one day he loves his work and the next day he doesn’t. He went and destroyed a whole lot of his paintings once, right before an exhibition. An absolute classic.

That’s why you have to be careful when you think a piece might be finished. Give it about a week. One day you’ll say, no, it’s not finished. The next day, yes, it is. You see a spectrum of emotions in it. The way you feel about it changes day to day to day, and that’s a healthy way to be.

I do wonder about Monet. If you laid all his works out in one long line, the ones that survived and the ones he destroyed, what would we see?

My mother is an absolute classic for this. She hates some works. “I don’t like it. You went the wrong direction. I’m not into it.” And I say, “I love it. Just sit with it. Look at it for a while.” And then suddenly the piece is up in her living room.

So here’s the rule. You, as the artist, need to know when a piece is finished, and when a piece should be destroyed. And don’t ever, ever let it leave your studio until you’re one hundred per cent convinced you’re in love with it. Because the day might come when you need to stand beside it and defend it. Only put work out there that you’d defend to your dying breath.

Once it’s done, varnish it properly. Know your varnish. I’ll chop and change between matte, satin and gloss to highlight different areas the way I want them.

And document what you used. If someone in twenty years, or a hundred, wants to remove the varnish and care for the work because something has happened to you, then if you’ve written down the products and haven’t used some dirty, cheap fixative, they can strip the varnish, recoat it and look after your painting. Don’t spray acrylics or oils with fixative. Use a varnish.

Wind. Possible chance of rain. Everything that should discourage you from going outside to paint. But we were ambitious. We will not be deterred.

Monet was a plein air painter. Outdoors, in the open air. I see a lot of people online painting outside now, plein air painters everywhere, and I love it. Go outside and paint.

The outdoors motivates and encourages me. Fresh air makes a massive difference. Without it, the artwork wouldn’t be the same.

Out in nature you’re way more refreshed. It’s simply a better place to do things. You’ll get a bit of sand in the artwork. It’ll rain on you every now and again. Problems will come in. But that chaos actually makes the painting better. Otherwise you’re locked in your own little world too much.

Sand, for what it’s worth, is pretty stable. Wherever it lands it’ll just add a nice little texture. Fly spray is another story. That’s chemicals, and you can’t guarantee it’s archival, or that it’ll behave between, under or on top of paint layers. If you don’t know, keep it away.

You need a mild day if you’re going to paint big outside. A board this size works with a bungee. Double it, and it’s a kite.

You’re not just working around the light and the weather. You’re dealing with gusts of wind taking it all away. For outside I use boards. They’re pretty invincible. If a gust does catch one, it’ll be okay.

Painting along the edge of the ridge at the gorge, the challenge is that when cloud banks or weather come through, they either slide down over us or straight into us. That’s the world we live in.

And one more thing about wind, for the oil painters. If you go the full Monty outdoors with oils, figure out the wind, and stand at an angle so it’s blowing away from you. Please.

The last time we did a sunrise, no joke, it was heavily windy. I was painting a landscape and it was blowing all over the place, and I couldn’t make a normal reel out of it. So I made a reel of the pain of it: all the blowing, an awesome power soundtrack behind it. It got a million views.

So maybe I should just get over the battles and go back out there into the wild morning.

Sunrise in New Zealand. The mountain behind me, the lake behind me too. I’ve got a coffee, a few colours, not every colour in the spectrum. It’s freezing, and I’m in shorts.

Someone in the chat said they couldn’t get out of bed because it was so cold. Fair. But imagine it was your last day. Every extra minute you stay in bed is a minute you’ll never get to relive. If that doesn’t make you think, actually, I’ll grab a coffee and just see what’s happening outside that window, I don’t know what will.

New Year’s Day, Langs Beach. A hot one. Smoking hot. A sudden gust of wind, and my shirt was covered in paint. Good news: it already was. If it had been oils, you’d want that off your skin. It was acrylic, so we dealt with the cards we’d been given.

Conventional wisdom says start with the background: deep sky, the sea, the land. Then the big features. Then, once you’re finished, add the branches over the top. I never do that.

I like adding the shadows in first, wherever they land. It builds a relationship between the sky and the sea. Otherwise your mountains feel superimposed onto the scene instead of intertwined with it. I don’t want you to see an obvious cut line between background and foreground. I find that so cheesy.

The easel I take out has extendable legs, so I can lift it whenever it suits me. A lot of easels are trapped at the size they come in, and that’s a pity, because there’s a real pleasure in being able to take your easel into all sorts of different spaces.

And then there’s the price of admission.

A sandfly under the chin, driving me absolutely wild. That’s a hyperbole. There are so many things that could be worse. But it’s so itchy. I sprayed myself with insect repellent, but only my legs, not high enough. Another time I was covered from head to toe, putting it on like a cologne, and the sandflies still came crawling.

Some mornings I’ve been in the car with everything packed, ready for a fantastic painting journey out in the wilderness, and the chance of rain is a hundred per cent. Plan cut. Today’s wilderness is the living room.

And sometimes the rain comes down so heavily it starts ruining the acrylic paint. Water-based, sure. It’s got water in it. But it’s plastic. So you go inside, and you look out the window, and the rain is still hammering down, and you know you made the right call.

Then you go back out tomorrow.

Too much is at stake to get to the end of your life without pursuing your dreams. And dreams don’t have to be big things. It can be something like going round the South Island in an RV, painting a few spots. It can be the simple act of painting at all.

Turn the camera on and you’re standing in a field in a thunderstorm holding a brush. Everyone can see you. And sometimes, nobody’s there at all.

I got back into painting at about twenty-seven because I knew I had to. I needed the creative outlet. I started a live stream because I wanted to connect with my family and let them see, because I knew it would be good for them.

And then, silly me, I left the stream on public. Arguably one of the best things I’ve ever done. Because now there’s a community. We’re bringing life to more people.

There’s alpha content: created, saturation pushed up, trying to look good for a little eight-second video that might go viral. And then there’s live. With live content you don’t have any of that. It’s just raw. You can’t not be real. You could still be fake, but it’s harder, because you’re in the moment. You have to be you. You can’t frame it.

The live is basically two things. It’s verification that that’s how it happened. And it’s provenance.

We still do certificates of authenticity, because they’re old school and everyone loves them. But the real provenance is this: how do you know it’s that painting? Look, here’s Seb. Fifteen, sixteen, twenty hours making this project. You can see every single brush stroke and how it came together, and me saying over and over what the painting is and how it’s being made. And here we are. Voila.

It polarises. Some people love my work, some people hate it. No one’s really indifferent.

Here’s the trap. If you’re making art, there isn’t really time to do all the other bits and pieces as a one-man band. You have to prioritise the art, and the making of the art. Your content, your following, your clients: everything has to come second.

Artists find that really tough. You think, but I have to make content, otherwise people won’t find my art. Yes. You do have to do those things. But try to make them take the back seat, or integrate without affecting the work. That’s the other thing live gives you. The painting session is the content. When it’s done, I can go home and spend time with my family.

You’d think if someone has more followers, or is more famous, they wouldn’t get hung up on individual comments. You do grow a thicker skin. That’s a fact. But.

I was painting two portraits on a live, and when I went to sign off, “Right, guys, we’ve had some fun, I’m packing up, have a great day,” someone jumped into the comments and wrote: “Don’t quit your day job.”

I used to put a lot of energy into critical feedback. When a negative comment appeared, I’d gravitate towards it, and it would really affect my art. Even if I thought, he’s talking nonsense, I’d inevitably try to make the next piece avoid that comment. Really dangerous. The comment isn’t always what you need to focus on, but it can start controlling you.

To anyone who has ever sat in a live chat: likes and shares help, obviously. But if you just want to chill, I love that too. Heck, even being in the live chat, not saying anything, not tapping like, just viewing, actually helps me make more art. All the viewership helps me find the next commission, the next person, another artist to talk to. Hopefully to inspire. Not all the time. But some of the time.

I took a break from streaming once. As time went on, I got more and more anxious about coming back. And funnily enough, being back felt more natural than the solo sessions had felt without being live. Sometimes you need to go live. Sometimes you need to paint for yourself. Both are allowed.

Everyone gets impostor syndrome. “I’m not sure if I should be doing this.” Do it a million times. Do it so much that the fear completely and utterly fades. Get so confident in your craft that there’s nothing in your mind saying you can’t do this. Through sheer practice, the intrusive thought goes quiet.

There’s a line I keep coming back to, and I say it a lot. If you let your own light shine, you unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. I’m doing it with painting. Being yourself is a bit freeing. It’s also terrifying, because people will see you.

A painting leaves the studio the way a kid leaves home: bubble-wrapped in everything you couldn’t say, nervous, a little overdressed, and absolutely sure it belongs somewhere else now.

A lot of artists don’t want to connect with collectors. That’s a mistake. If a part of you goes into the art, it makes sense that you’d love to connect with the person who loves that picture enough to put it in their home.

My favourite thing about being an artist is connecting with collectors. Talking with them. I talk all day about how I feel, so it’s refreshing to hear how someone who watches and wants the art feels: what resonates with them, what doesn’t. That connecting element is the only reason art matters, in my mind anyway.

If a collector buys a painting, it’s not just, here’s a pretty picture, hang it in your home. It’s also: I know the artist was made better by making this. Yes, the artist can now buy some food and keep a roof over their head. But more importantly, I’m bringing that artist’s good energy, good vibe and good intention into my home. I don’t want to bring an artist’s negative intention into my home.

We love the idea that on the real Starry Night we can see where the paint was stroked. That’s the one Van Gogh touched. That object sat beside him while he looked at the night sky and put paint on it. We believe it’s special because of that. Call it the aura of the painting. Don’t let your aura be anything other than personal growth and joy. You owe that not just to yourself, but to every collector who wants to believe in your work.

Every commission I take starts the same way. Someone writes, and I write back:

Short answer: I’d love to.

I’ll film and share the entire process so you’ll know exactly how things are tracking. Works take twelve layers on average. That gives me plenty of runway for long replay videos and fiery short videos, for a bit of fun. It’s delivered ready to hang. All you need is a good hook or screw and you’ll be totally golden. The work has a custom-built protective travel case, designed to be kept. If you move house, store the work, or have something else special to protect, the case is perfect for just that.

Let it feel right.

Then the slow part. The good part.

Before I start dreaming up ideas, show me more of your travel photos. Don’t be shy. Inundate me.

Our surface is almost ready to paint on. The photographs are up around my studio to gaze at. The one we locked on first still feels right. Let’s talk about this place. I want to understand how you feel about it. Go deep or, if it feels right, keep it simple. I’m here for either.

Then the work is finished, and sometimes it isn’t. “First off, thanks for your unbelievable patience with me. Framed and boxed, the work was ready to leave the studio. Your artist tore open the box to add a few more layers. A video is attached below. I want this piece to be perfect.”

And then, sometimes, months later, an email comes back the other way, with a photo of the painting on a wall I’ve never stood in front of.

I think social media has done for the art world what streaming did for music. Do we agree with everything about it? Irrelevant. You’ve now got almost all the music in human existence in your pocket, and Jeff Bezos listening to Ed Sheeran hears the same song you do. Everyone’s involved at the same value. Art isn’t there yet. You don’t get all the art you’ve ever wanted, anywhere in the world, for free. I don’t fully understand how it will happen, but I think art will get there too. Nobody will be gatekept from the best experience of art.

Until then, I paint live, and anyone can pull up a chair.

"I'd love to see photos that make you feel a little something. The best place to find them is your camera roll, and, weirdly enough, the 'photographic quality' of a photo holds very little sway over whether it turns into a beautiful painting."

"Let's talk about this place. I want to understand how you feel about it. Go deep or, if it feels right, keep it simple."

"We're probably looking down the barrel of about seven more layers at the moment, but we'll see how we go. The paint's getting really thick, and it's going to look so great in different lighting."

"The more time we play with the longer we get to connect."

"Connection is the single most important reason to create art."

My daughter is doing amazingly. She is the biggest delight. She owns the studio. She says, “Daddy, painting, painting, painting,” as if there’s no “a” in painting, and it’s gorgeous.

Put that sentence next to everything in Part Six. Hold them both at once. That’s the whole book.

If you’re setting goals now: I just want as much time with my daughter as possible. I want to keep growing as an artist. I want to meet new people. I want to connect with more people. I want to make sure Shelby is as happy as she can be. I want to make my dad proud. I want to make my mum proud. I want Cooper to be as happy as she can be. I want to see more of my brothers.

Now I’m just getting greedy, aren’t I?

My father was talking to me one morning and said, “I really like the way you do eyes, and I really think that’s a winner for you. That’s really something I love about your artwork.” All right, I thought. Today I was going to do another face. Let’s just zoom right in on the eyeball and see what happens.

Another time he was looking at Little Fisherman, at the lake in that picture, Silver Lake, and he said, “That right there, that’s what that clever guy did with his sunflowers. The way you’ve used those yellows, that’s the thing.”

I’m like: that guy’s Van Gogh, Dad.

One of my paintings started from a photo my father took in Antarctica about twenty years ago. It works on a couple of levels, but I like the story behind it. He took it when he visited a penguin colony. He was flying helicopters.

The Gower family came to New Zealand from Cornwall with John Gower, written down as profession: agricultural. Six or seven generations of farmers after that. My father was a farmer too, but he pursued deer recovery, and doing deer recovery, he ended up flying helicopters. Once he was flying helicopters, we weren’t on the farm as often. That’s where I ended up becoming a bit more of an artist.

A tractor bloodline, a rotor-blade father, and a son with a brush. Same family. Same stubbornness. Different tools.

Life has settled down here in the Bay of Plenty. The studio is eighty per cent finished: a giant white room with a dark grey floor. Cooper is nearly two, and Shelby and I bought a piece of land that overlooks the New Zealand countryside.

I owe my collectors a personal thank you for that. Their collecting made part of this little dream possible.

Yes. Still here. Still painting. Still going live.

If you don’t have time to read this book, I’ll summarise.

Don’t let go.

Let go.

It’s complicated.

A human being is never finished, the same as a work of art. Not every painting needs the colour blue or a finished moment.

Answers are more like seeds. They don’t come and fix and remake the world you live in. The reality you’re in is now, and it’s unchangeable. An answer can be planted, to grow.

So here’s the seed. Somewhere there’s a brush you put down. A tube with its lid glued on. A sketchbook with three pages used. Go and find it. Lay layer one, and make it wild. Make it messy. Don’t judge it until layer seven.

Christmas is about giving presents. Matariki is about being present. When those stars come back over Aotearoa, it’s about our ancestors, the future, and most of all the simple word: present. Being here, now. A brush in your hand is the most present I know how to be.

You're going to be great.

Your artist,

Seb