The live painting demo on Saturday at the School of Visual Philosophy Autumn Art Fair turned out to be a great success. I was a little skeptical that I’d be able to accomplish anything substantial in one hour, and I actually didn’t accomplish much as far as completing a painting, but I accomplished a lot as far as demonstrating how I work through the process of creating one of my paintings. The people gathered around to watch had some awesome questions, and it was a lot of fun.

Above are the canvases I brought to the demo to represent various stages of my process. The two in the back had been covered with leftover paint from other painting sessions, one of my favorite ways to start a new canvas. The one on the left had been marked up beyond the initial stage of adding leftover paint. The one on the right was even further along and I had started adding the sky to it.

During the demo, I painted on all of them except the one with the added sky. To the two in the back, I added colorful marks using various tools that I’ve collected. These marks are mostly covered in a final painting, but have the benefit of providing texture and depth to it. The depth can be seen where small bits of it peek through, adding interest to the painting.

The paintings above show the state of the canvases after the demo finished. The one in the center is the one that was on the far left in the previous photo. You can see that I rotated it 180 degrees and decided it needed some contrast and so I applied big areas of black just before the demo finished. I switch back and forth between using black or dark purple for contrast. I don’t think I had the dark purple with me on Saturday.

On Tuesday of this week, I worked some more on that canvas and decided to experiment with a rolling flower hills landscape painting (pictured below). It doesn’t show up very well in this photo, but the black gives an impression of distant mountains. Right now, I’m undecided on whether I like it or will decide to paint over it. Whatever I do, it’s a long way from being a finished painting.