The truth is, I have no friggin’ idea what I’m doing.

I have a protocol too, but it’s unfortunately dynamic. I’m a restless soul; if I master an idea, I need to move on to the next idea. It’s why I never end up with highly-finished paintings; when the conclusion is obvious, I move on. That means on some level I’m constantly flailing. (This is not a trait I admire in myself, by the way; I think it would be nice to just luxuriate in the paint once in a while.)

This is not to say that nothing stays the same: in oil painting there are some fairly inviolable rules that only a masochist or a neophyte would break. But there many things that you can mash up, and it seems like I’m constantly running through my bag of tricks to find some exciting way of fleshing out a thorny passage. Sometimes it works and sometimes it makes a terrific mess.

 This only matters when I have an audience, since in the privacy of my own studio I dump all my sketches in a towering heap and ignore them. Generally when I paint in public, I am very conscious of the people around me, and I end up spending lots of my time talking with them. This is one of my Favorite Things, but I also unconsciously tend to paint “prettier” when painting for an audience.

Today I visited lovely Glen Park in Williamsville. Since it is a busy suburban park, I even combed my hair in expectation of chance encounters with strangers. But those crazy Buffalonians were excessively respectful of my privacy.

Good thing, because I was rapidly down another rabbit hole—my favorite place to be, of course.  I never know if a field painting is “good” when I’m working on it, or even immediately after finishing it. (And I think most other painters don’t know either; they just know if the painting they’ve done matches their idea of how they’ve painted so far.) I simply see a series of problems to be solved. In this case, there was a triad of trees whose branches paired with the little creek to enfold the bridge into an ellipse. Had I had a little more time, I would have worked more carefully on the structure of lights and darks in the unfurling leaves. But who ever has enough time?