Starting a 26” x 20”pastel painting!

A:  That’s an interesting question because I happen to be re-reading The War of Art by Steven Pressfield and this morning I saw this:  

You know, Hitler wanted to be an artist.  At eighteen he took his inheritance, seven hundred kronen, and moved to Vienna to live and study.  He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts and later to the school of architecture.  Ever see one of his paintings?  Neither have I.  Resistance beat him.  Call it overstatement but I’ll say it anyway:  it was easier for Hitler to start World War II than it was for him to face a blank square of canvas.

I’ve never understood this fear of “the blank canvas” because I am always excited about beginning a new painting.  When you think about it, artists can often say,  “In the history of the planet no one has ever made what I am about to make!”  Once again I am looking at something new on my easel,  even if it is only a blank 26” x 20” piece of sandpaper clipped to a slightly larger piece of foam core. 

Unlike artists who are paralyzed before “a blank canvas,” I am energized by the imagined possibilities of all that empty space! I spend three or four months on a pastel painting so this experience of looking at a blank piece of paper on my easel happens three or four times a year at most. 

Excluding travel to remote places, which is essential to my work and endlessly fascinating, the first day I get to spend blocking in a new painting is the most exhilarating part of my whole creative process.  It’s when I feel the freest!  I select the pastel colors quickly, without thinking too much about them, first imagining them, then feeling, looking, and reacting intuitively, always correcting and trying to make the painting look better and better!

Comments are welcome!