“What appeared to interest him more than anything else when I arrived was to know what music I had brought with me.”
— John Singer Sargent
It may surprise people to know my favorite thing in oil painting isn’t an art supply per se, but a work of art in itself. Truthfully, I rely on my favorite thing far more than any particular easel, paint, paintbrush or canvas type. It’s music! Music is an integral part of my path to relaxation and focus. Maybe because my main studio is just off the dinning room in a large old house with two stomping teenagers and a noisy firefighter who, for some reason, seems to be mowing the lawn whenever I’m starting a painting, but I need music. That is not to say that I cannot paint without it, but to say that music plays as much a roll as getting me ready to make a work of art as doing sketches and color studies.
My taste in music is so broad, true music aficionados will say I have none at all. My playlist splays out in all directions including Radio Head, Emily Pandofi, Eagles and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. The music I choose is indicative of the way I start a piece, completely dependent on how I’m feeling that day.
My fallback music is by Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s Pride & Prejudice Music from the Motion Picture. There is nothing sweeter if you want to start the day with Dawn. And, though I may be revealing a bit of personal information which could be used to uncover an undiagnosed disorder of the obsessive type, I admit in many cases, I listen to the same song repeatedly for days upon days as I work on a piece, usually at a decibel that is truly uncomfortable for everyone else in my house and usually involving some sort of dancing between strokes.
For example, when creating “City Blues” (above right) I played Purple Rain by Prince & the Revolution album. Yes, I’m serious. Purple Rain played and played for days.To my husband’s chagrin, it was Carolina In My Mind by James Taylor that flooded the house for nearly a month as I toiled over the pearls in my work “String of Pearls” (left). Like I said, there is no accounting for taste, but there is also no denying, music, music I love, takes me to the state of mind in which I find my best work.
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My sketching routine includes the use of viewfinders which I make out of black illustration board. I have a different viewfinder for every proportion canvas I paint on. I walk around a location looking through my viewfinder until I see a combination of value shapes that looks promising. I then put my viewfinder against a page in my sketchbook, and use the window to draw a box on the page with my pencil. If I’m going to paint on an 8×10” panel, I’ll use a viewfinder with an 8×10” proportion window, thus matching that same proportion in my pencil sketch. It’s important for me to control my composition and I find this strategy very helpful.
Every now and then I get a drawing that really captures the light and I’m always amazed that this can be achieved in just a quick pencil sketch. I sometimes do more than one sketch for a scene – experimenting with different compositions – but most of the time it’s just one sketch and then on to the painting. If the sketch turns out nicely, then I’m encouraged and excited to move ahead with painting, and might refer to it briefly trying to keep what it was about the sketch that appealed to me.
The sketchbooks now serve as a chronicle of my life since I started painting. They place paintings in a time specific context and include street names, painting locations, names of people I met while painting, times of day and other random bits of information. They are a great reference to have and a diary of all my painting adventures over the years. I’ve thought about doing larger, more finished drawings. But for now, the sketches in the book are enough.
