Notes on Queen Anne's Lace

   I used the so-called chromatic palette at the time that I painted Queen Anne’s Lace. It is colored more vividly than I would color it today. The painting was done primarily on site. It took several visits to the location to complete it. That location was about 100 miles from home, so I camped, always hoping for the weather to co-operate and allow me a second session of painting. I don’t remember anymore how many trips I made. I worked on it off site as well, from notations I made on site. Time is more of a constraint when working on site. Early or late in the day, the period available shrinks because the daylight effects change most quickly following dawn and preceding sunset. This painting was done in the mid to late afternoon, and I had a window of approximately two hours. I liked to make what I called notes or notations on a painting with the aim of developing them off site later on. This enabled me to gather certain information on site, and make judgments about which things I ought to give the most attention to while on site working, and which things I thought I could work on off site if I had some basic notes to follow about shape, color, tone, etc. Photos were not used in the making of this painting.

   I don’t make paintings like this anymore. I have committed myself to doing paintings that can be completed in a day. On occasion, I will take a painting out for a second time. This is not due to a commitment to any particular principle, beyond my commitment to working from nature. It is due mostly to having limited time available to paint, and happily, I find I have a preference for doing lots of small paintings instead of a few larger ones. For the record, I am not saying I will never do larger sizes again. There is a freshness to a one day painting that is hard to maintain in more studied works. Sometimes studied works have more depth and richness. Sometimes they get overworked. And sometimes, one day paintings are not worked enough. I used to tell students - somewhat tongue in cheek, but there is truth in the statement – that a painting is finished when it has the right number of brushstrokes in it. Too many or too few diminish it.