Painting New Orleans Blog

I’ve been thinking lately about how the process of creating a painting has a lot in common with the process of raising a child.  There are stages that all paintings go through that mirror the stages and sometimes the dramas of human development. 

The early stage of a painting is the most free and open. When you start a painting it has unlimited potential, as does a baby .There is so much white space on the canvas and you don’t know what’s going to happen.    You try to set limits at this stage, but you won’t know if the painting ----or the kid ----is going to turn out all right. 

And then comes the “teenager stage”, a stage I dread, when the painting begins to come together and you come face-to-face with your limitations as an artist.  Most of the white canvas is gone and you see what you are dealing with,--it’s the make or break moment.  As with a teenager, there is the risk that the painting might go off the rails or, worse yet, go nowhere.  Ultimately this stage is where the painting finds its identity, and you lose that sense of openness and innocence from the baby stage

Finally, the painting approaches adulthood where the battles have mostly been fought and all that remains is to have fun with the details and watch the scene come to life.  This is where all of your hard work pays off and you feel comfortable with letting the painting take you where it needs to go.  Each stage in painting, and in life, has its joys and perils; it helps to be aware of, and sensitive to, the unique challenges of each stage, so that paintings, and children, have a chance to blossom..