People imagine a painter's studio as a burst of inspiration — music loud, paint flying, a canvas finished by lunch. My studio in Riverside is quieter, and slower, and I would not trade it. Oil painting rewards patience more than speed. Let me walk you through a real day, from first coffee to the moment I know a painting is done.
The morning is for looking
I start by looking, not painting. Yesterday's work is still on the easel, and overnight it has changed — not the paint, but my eyes. In morning light I see what I missed the night before: a color too loud, a shape that needs to breathe. I just stand there, sometimes twenty minutes, and let the painting tell me what it needs.
Then I clean. Brushes get washed, the palette gets scraped, and colors I want to keep are saved in small piles. A clean studio is not about being tidy. It is about making room in your head.
Choosing the palette comes before the first stroke
Every painting starts with a palette, and the palette is a decision about feeling before it is a decision about color. If I am working on something hopeful, I reach for warm golds and open blues. If the painting is about quiet or rest, the blues go deeper and the golds soften.
Desert Sun began that way — with the memory of late light, and a palette built around warmth first. Blue Dream, by contrast, started cool: layered blues with just enough light breaking through to keep it alive. I mix more paint than I think I need, because stopping mid-passage to remix a color breaks the rhythm, and the new mix never quite matches the old one.
The middle of the day is the real work
By late morning I am painting in long stretches. Oil is slow — that is its gift. I can push it, blend it, lift it off with a knife, and lay a new layer over one that is still wet. Texture is not an accident in my work. I build it, layer by layer, so the surface holds the light the way real life does.
A large piece like Three Fishes, 48 by 48 inches on wood panel, can occupy the whole day and still not be finished. Big paintings have their own weather. You work close, where all you see is texture and color, then you step back six feet, then ten, because the painting has to work from across a room as well as from arm's length. I go back and forth all day. My studio floor knows those steps well.
Breaks are part of the process
I stop for lunch away from the easel — always away. If I eat looking at the painting, I keep solving it in my head and come back tired instead of fresh. In the afternoon, the light in the studio changes, and that matters. Colors that looked balanced at noon can look heavy at four o'clock. I keep the most important color decisions for the light I trust, and I use the later hours for drawing, edges, and detail.
This is also when I turn the painting upside down for a few minutes. It sounds like a trick, but it works: upside down, I stop seeing fish, or a face, or a staircase, and I see only shapes and balance. If the composition holds upside down, it holds right side up.
Knowing when to stop
The hardest skill in oil painting is not starting. It is stopping. A painting can be ruined in the last twenty minutes by a painter who keeps fixing what was never broken. My rule is simple: when the painting gives back more than I put in — when it surprises me a little — I clean my brushes and leave it alone until morning. If it still surprises me the next day, it is done, and I sign it.
Between paintings, I stretch and prepare the next surface, check on commissions, and answer collectors myself. I am a living artist, here in the studio, painting today — if you write to me about a work, you are writing to the person who made it, standing in this room.
That is a day here. No drama, no shortcuts. Just light, oil, patience, and one canvas at a time, until the room holds something that did not exist in the morning.
Want to see what is on the easel, or find a painting for your wall? Write to me at [email protected] — tell me about your space and I will answer you myself.