Classical Study

I'd been making abstract work for almost two years when I felt the pull to draw from life again.

Not nostalgia — something more specific. I wanted to remember how to see. When you work abstractly long enough, you can start to lose the anchor of direct observation, the humility of having to look at something and actually render it. The classics exist for exactly this: to remind you how much you don't know.

I chose oil on board because I wanted the slowness. Acrylic forgives you. Oil makes you negotiate.

The subject for a classical study matters less than the light.

I spent half a day moving a single lamp. The subject itself — a simple arrangement of fabric and form — was incidental. What I was really studying was one specific quality of light: the way it wraps around a curved surface and falls off into shadow, the precise moment where lit becomes unlit.

There are, I counted once, approximately twenty distinct values between pure white and true shadow in a single fold of fabric. This painting is an attempt to find all twenty.

Oil dries when it wants to. You cannot rush it.

This piece was worked over eleven sittings across three weeks. Some sessions lasted four hours. Some lasted twenty minutes — just enough time to add one glaze of colour over a dry layer and leave again. The painting spent more time drying than it did being painted.

This enforced patience changed what I was making. Each return forced me to really look at what was already there before adding anything new. I think of it now as the discipline the painting imposed on me, not the discipline I brought to it.

The final session was just the highlights.

When you work in the classical tradition, you build from dark to light — you establish your darks, your mid-tones, and you add the lights last. The lights are earned. You can't put them in early; they won't have anything to sit on top of.

I used a small flat brush loaded with titanium white and just a touch of raw sienna — barely warm, barely there. Three marks. The top of a surface catching the light, a sliver along the shadow edge, and one reflected light in the darkest part of the form. Suddenly the thing existed in three dimensions. After weeks of slow building, three marks and it breathed.