Thought I'd share the paintings and drawings that lead up to the final painting.
All the way from the first little watercolor to the final large painting. Sometimes I think of how one could fit the size of more than a hundred pieces of the first sketch on the canvas of the final painting.
Or how a sketch can take less than an hour to make and the painting almost three years.
To be said it's never about the actual time it takes, time passes no matter what we do, but that I made it, I got to where I wanted in the end. For me it's always about the end result and how I got there. Never about the time but on what actually comes of the journey.
And how we get there is important.
As a good friend of mine expressed it, "a day walking is an extra day living."
Which is also why the idea of the process is important.
This is where you push yourself and see how well you sit with your ideas while working, living your piece. Live art, don't let art live you.
The more you spend challenging yourself the more you push the process and the more the process will push you. This to me is when I grow out of old worn tracks.
It's not only how far can you go, but also, how deep.
Be it me whispering to myself in my sketchbook or holding my palette debating choices infront of the canvas.
It happens on all planes and it happens over a long time.
For example, I remember the moment I placed the cliff in the center running into the sea in the painting. It was the mountain rising from out of the sea bed where I grew up. Standing in my studio in Florence I was at that moment physically home. One could say I had seen this mountain so many times that I could paint it from memory.
The brain is a complex processor working at all times, and when we let it do it's thing in the background it'll find connections. It's like dreaming in a awake state. At this point as was traveling to my home, I arrived by sea, meet by this cliff. This to me is part of the process.
A moment like this makes it worth the struggle to work on a painting. And there are hundreds of these moments in each piece.
Expressed in the feeling of the air. Grasp for the sound, the smell. Do what you can, just don't limit yourself.
How colorful and rich do you want to make your art journey. I'm interested in finding out.
Go to great lenghts, and depths.
Enjoy the journey of searching!
