Moving Deeper into Light: A Painting in Progress

Every painting has a conversation built into it, between observation and memory, between what you see and what you know.

This one has been particularly insistent; it began somewhere I rarely start: with drawing.

I don't usually work this way. Typically, color comes first, and the surface is built from the inside out, through washes and layers. But sometimes I deliberately push my own limits, and this time that meant beginning with charcoal on bare canvas.

Charcoal drawing on 48 × 48” canvas

Standing in front of tangled growth, letting the hand follow what the eye found, no color yet, just the lines crossing and recrossing, finding the structure hidden inside the complexity of the natural world.

That single decision changed everything that followed. I introduced the color slowly. First, as washes, light and tentative, I was feeling for the temperature of what wanted to come into the world. Green and yellow, and that particular blue that lives in shadows. The branches are still present, still themselves, but now they are beginning to exist inside a world rather than just describing one.

This is where the painting starts to ask its own questions.

first washes of color

The work was going very slowly. It presented a big challenge. I had to be present to the work, listen to it as it developed, and I had to be willing to be spontaneous, even while being conservative, as it developed so slowly.

At a certain point, I noticed something I hadn't intended. The branching structure and the color cells between them had begun to resemble stained glass. Beautiful, perhaps, but wrong.

Stained glass is resolved, contained, and declarative and decorative. It has a kind of certainty that works against everything I am trying to do. These paintings are meant to stay alive and unstable, not to resolve too quickly. So I had to find a way back. I removed some color and softened the sharp transitions. Reinforced the branches.

Work in progress

Then I noticed that the whites were another problem. I had put them in deliberately. I painted a splash of white again and again, trying to find the light inside the surface. But that splash was sitting too clearly on top. It was too much like light placed rather than light found.

The answer came, as answers often do, from simply looking, while not in the studio. As I was driving around here in the Brandywine Valley in late winter, I paid attention to the white trees and bare branches pale against the landscape. In this painting, I deliberately painted the branches to move forward and back in space. Reflecting on nature, I understood what the painting needed.

The whites could become limbs. Not light as a thing applied to the surface, but light as structure, as growth, as something moving through space toward you and away from you at the same time.

Now I know where to start to solve this problem.

I introduced magenta.

getting closer

And then a couple of sessions later, after more branch definition and more blues, it is finished!

Where Light Lives 48× 48” Oil paint on acrylic subplanting

This painting will join others in a show at the Grand Opera House in Wilmington, opening May 1, 2026. All of the paintings included are a residue of time spent in the natural world. Begun in observation, they were resolved somewhere deeper, in memory and intuition.

Deeper into the light.