How Long Does an Original Painting Actually Take

The honest answer is longer than you think, and also thirty years. Let me explain. Both halves are true and the second one is the part that actually justifies the price of original work, so let me take them separately.

The literal answer

A large piece runs roughly ten to twelve weeks from an approved concept, maybe longer depending on the complexity of the design. Some of that is paint. A surprising amount of it is not.

There is the surface itself, which on textural work can take weeks before anything that looks like an image exists. Building, sanding, building again. There is drying, which is not optional and cannot be hurried, and which is the reason a painting has opinions about your calendar. There is the stage where the piece is wrong and I do not yet know why, which can eat a week and which nobody has ever successfully scheduled.

And there is the part that people find hardest to believe. I recently spent four hours on a two inch section in the lower left of a painting that nobody will ever consciously notice. This is a common phenomenon for many artist, and part of the job I guess.

That is not a confession of inefficiency. That section is doing structural work. If it is wrong, the eye will not rest anywhere in the picture and no one will be able to tell you why, or the opposite will happen and all you can notice is the one thing that is not quite right and that's all you see in when you look at the work. Getting it right is invisible by design. It is also, in year eight of living with a painting, a large part of the difference between a piece you still look at and a piece that has become wallpaper.

The thirty year answer

The other half is that the decisions get made fast now because they were made slowly for a very long time.

I did not go to art school. I learned from library books and a completely unreasonable amount of stubbornness. Neither one came with a tutorial.I have made a million mistakes, some ended up being happy little surprises that I ended up keeping in my process but not all of them. I have tossed a lot of art in the trash can and maybe shed a tear or two over it. But now what I have instead is a very long record of getting it wrong, which is what lets me look at a passage now and know in about a second that the value is off, rather than spending a day discovering it.

So when the question is how long did that take, the true answer includes every painting that failed on the way to being able to make that one.

What this means if you are commissioning

Plan backwards from the wall, not forwards from the idea. If a room needs to be finished by spring, the conversation happens in autumn. There is no urgency in that, it is simply the arithmetic of a medium that dries at its own speed.

Expect the timeline to include a stage where you see something unresolved. That stage is not a problem, it is the middle. Every painting looks like a mistake somewhere around week five.

And expect the last ten percent to take about as long as the first half. That is where the two inch sections live.

Its a fun journey that creating takes you on. Thanks for stopping by.

Warmly,

Dani