I have a list about a mile long of things I want to paint and of things I need to paint that will bring me up to speed with requests, commissions and various projects I’ve expressed interest in. They are all exciting and I want to attend to them all at once. It is impossible to do them all at once, of course.

To resolve this fortunate problem I allocate time for the work that I need to do, and for the work that I want to do, during the days that I paint (most days).

I’ve talked about my commission work in a previous blog - I set time aside early in the morning for that…usually before breakfast. I’m working on a commission right now in-between writing these sentences for this blog. It’s a nearly finished little animal portrait, and to complete it I am doing a series of little touchups and corrective tweaks, and after each set of these thoughtful brush marks I turn away from the painting, write a sentence here then turn back to it with “fresh eyes”, and this helps me from over working the painting and losing some of the spontaneity of the first marks of paint…(that’s what I tell myself, anyway)…

You see it takes time to finish paintings…time spent thinking about it not actually painting it, and sometimes this can feel like procrastinating…(come to think of it maybe that’s exactly what it is), so it’s helpful to have some other simple tasks to do in-between each set of tweaks, like housework, checking emails, bookwork, blogging…starting a new painting….except the problem with starting a new painting is that you can get so caught up in it that before you know it you’ve got two paintings that need finishing…or three…or twenty paintings that need finishing.

It’s important to finish paintings - by finish I mean as finished as they can possibly be kind-of-finished. That means signed, dated, ready to hang, photographed and shipped kind-of-finished.

For me it works best to spend time finishing paintings in the mornings, a hour minimum each morning so that I can feel like I’ve worked productively, done what i’m suppose to do and then be free to explore or start something new later in the day, something fun, or a thing I’m curious about or have been meaning to try, or a study or a request…

…which may very well end up on the morning pile, needing to be finished.