From nine to five

I´d like to start this post quoting Chuck Close.

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

(Charles Thomas “Chuck” Close (born July 5, 1940) American painter and photographer.)

Last week we returned from our short trip to the Netherlands. And back to work right away. The project of which I wrote in my post of August 13th was already on the easel waiting for me. Everything well prepared before I left. The sketches approved by the client, the linen stretched, covered with three layers of gesso and the drawing carefully transferred in red crayon. So, immediately after returning I was able to start. I like to work from nine to five. I never have to wait for the inspiration that Chuck Close writes about. However, I do need to be well focussed and the run up to that sometimes takes days. Part of the concentration process is applying the underpainting. In the final version of this painting there is a lot of blue and green, and that’s why I like to use a magenta undertone.