It’s almost New Year’s, so it’s time to take a step back and adjust that attitude of yours! How you think about painting, and what you think about before, during, and after. So here are three tips you can try for reframing and revitalizing your creative process in 2025.
1. THINK AGAIN
The late Canadian landscapist Robert Genn suggested that, “rather than go with your first choice in a composition, go with your second choice.” Why? I think it’s partly because our first choice is often the safest, because it’s one we’ve seen before. Painting from the hip is a challenge, so it’s no wonder we tend to summon up every bit of what we know works before we even begin.
But the first composition that “comes to you” is probably one you’ve received from paintings you’ve studied and liked. “It’s likely to be in your comfort zone, but it is your second choice that will stretch your capabilities and expose new creativity. How to do this?” Genn suggests the following: “Slowly rotate yourself in a full circle, taking every possibility into consideration. Sort out and at least anticipate the potentials of every angle before you start.”
Sometimes it’ll just click. Something jumps out at you and suddenly you can imagine the the general outline of the finished piece, even though you have no idea how to even start – and that’s your painting.
Matt Ryder, Blazing Trail, oil, 36” x 47” Matt teaches his methods in his video Painting Rocks and Sunlight.
2. LISTEN TO THE PAINT Maintain a dialogue with your painting. After every few strokes, consider what’s changed and instead of panicking and worrying about how to fix it, ask how it relates to the whole and whether it suggests something about what might happen next. React imaginatively – to your subject, but also to the relationships between color and brushwork that you create.
Oil paintings are infinitely changeable, and creativity ultimately mysterious – but if you try to avoid automatically insisting that it it’s your way or the highway, your painting may just start leading you where you really want to go (whether you know it or not).
Rockwell Kent, “Moonlight in the Adirondacks, “ca. 1960, oil on panel, 11 7/8 × 15 7/8 in. (30.1 × 40.3 cm)
3. SIT AT THE FEET OF MASTERS. Not necessarily literally, I mean find the paintings that humble and excite you, that make your head explode, that make you say “Yes – THAT’S painting.” Don’t copy them – instead, see if you can isolate the specific qualities in them that you’re responding to. They don’t have to be by dead people (though some of them probably should be). Just let yourself be blown away by what an artist you’ve encountered has achieved.
Why pay attention to the past? Because the depth of feeling you can cultivate for art in general will invest your own paintings with comparable feeling in both subtle and highly important ways.
See what the greats have done and ask not how but why. See if you can intuit their dialogue with the work (see tip #2) and the decisions they made (and more importantly, rejected – see tip #1). Give yourself permission to look at paintings (and the world, of course) not just with your eyes but with your emotions, take a deep breath, and remember this. Implicitly understand the “why” – the only answer to which you need to know is: “Because Damn – that’s PAINTING!”
Joaquin Mir, “Mirror of the Church (El Espejo de la Iglesia),” 1926, oil on canvas
A Light in Winter
Samia Halaby, “Sun,” about 36 x 36 in., acrylic on canvas
“Sun” by abstract painter Samia Halaby lights up the canvas with a life and warmth rare in contemporary art. Her canvases have been called “luxurious fields of color and form, each one pulsating with its own energy.”
Halaby says creating “Sun” was a challenge to herself. “I was challenging myself to make a painting that’s basically yellow and blue. There’s touches of orange, touches of green, but very subtle variations. I was doing that to describe the relativity of light and color in abstract painting.” (MSU website)
Such vitality brings a welcome joyfulness and simplicity to the gray landscapes of winter.
At 86, Halaby is resolutely optimistic in her work. Her approach is to routinely ask herself, “How am I going to catch this experience in a painting?” Her first solo museum show in the U.S. just wrapped up at Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University.
Says Hyperallergic: Born in Palestine in 1936, Halaby and her family were displaced to Lebanon in 1948 and moved to the United States three years later. Through this lens, the constant activity in her abstractions starts to suggest geographic migration, whether by choice or not. Michigan (where she did her undergraduate degree and the site of her 2024 retrospective) has the largest Arab and Arab-American population in the US, but art exhibitions by Arab and Muslim artists, particularly women, still aren’t as frequent as they should be, and they’re no more common in the rest of the country. In fact, a retrospective show of Halaby’s works was slated to open at the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University (where she received her MFA) this February, but it was abruptly canceled in what many, including the artist herself, saw as an act of suppression of Palestinian voices.
