Inside the Studio: From Blank Canvas to Finished Piece

People often ask how long a painting takes. It's a fair question with a frustrating answer: a piece takes as long as it takes — and most of that time, nothing appears to be happening at all. Here's a look behind the curtain at how a work actually comes to life.

It Begins Before the Brush

Every piece starts as a feeling and a few decisions, not an image. What is this work about — abundance, stillness, drama? What ground will it live on: ivory, jade, velvet black? Those early choices shape everything that follows. A work like Tropical Nocturne was black in its imagination long before a single leaf was painted; the darkness had to come first, so the colour could burn against it.

Building the Bones

For the textured and relief works, the next stage is sculpture more than painting. Medium is built up by hand to create the raised forms — the leaves, the branches, the petals. This is slow, physical work, and it's unforgiving: once a form is set, it's set. The composition has to be right in three dimensions before any colour is committed.

Then comes the waiting. Built surfaces must cure fully before the next layer can go on. A painting can sit untouched for days, looking unfinished, while the most important thing of all — time — does its work.

The Colour, and the Gold

Only now does the piece begin to look like itself. Colour is layered, adjusted, deepened. Where gold is used, it's applied late and carefully, because it changes everything around it — a single gilded passage can lift or overwhelm a whole composition.

The hardest part of finishing a painting is knowing when to stop touching it.

Knowing When It's Done

There's no formula for the final moment. A piece is finished when nothing more can be added without taking something away — when the surface, the colour, and the light all agree. Often the last decision is simply to put the brush down and let the work be what it has become.

That's the quiet privilege of an original: it holds all of that time, all of those decisions, in a single surface. When it hangs on your wall, everything that went into it is hanging there too.