It is always a mystery to me how long it takes an Alla Prima painter to finish her work. Most of the demos I watched online were one to three hours long, and never did an artist claim it as a finished work. It is also hard to tell if the artist doing the demo was aiming at a complete work or just an oil portrait sketch. Plus, how do you even define the completeness of a piece? Those lovely and highly admired vignettes by the late Richard Schmid, are they finished works? 

When I was taking online classes at Watts Atelier, Jeff’s demo was usually a one-hour video, and he expected students to finish their piece in no more than 1.5 to 2 hours. That was a guideline I rarely followed. Not that I wasn’t willing to; I just didn’t have the adequate skills and mindset to achieve it. I took a video lesson from Susan Lyon earlier this year thanks to my East Oak Studio subscription. She advocates an exercise of doing a live portrait within one hour and then doing the same pose 2 more times in a row. The idea is to focus on the essence – what you can see when you squint. With repetition, you could improve your focus along the way. You go into these exercises with good preparation. She used a limited palette – transparent red oxide, ultramarine blue, and white, and she would premix colors into a value scale. The most important part is the mental preparation. You decide in advance where your darkest dark and lightest light is, and if they appear in multiple places in your reference (more than often, that’s the case), you must choose one. You also need to decide where the strongest edge would be – where the sharp contrast is (because when values are close to each other, the edge disappears). Other things that need to be considered include composition, what atmosphere to create, what types of strokes you want to employ, etc. I would say this is a great checklist to start any painting. Festina lente – as Sean Cheetham said, “Take your time on everything if you want to paint fast.”

East Oak Studio does a monthly free streaming called “Oil Painting from Life.” You can paint portraits and sometimes still life along with their resident artists and hear them chat. Most sessions are between 2 and 3 hours. I enjoyed the program very much, but I find myself constantly struggling when the time is up. Should I leave it as it is or keep working on it?  Deep down, I see myself as an indirect painter. I like to take my time and work in layers, just like most artists at East Oak, but they all vouched for the benefit of doing these shorter Alla Prima paintings. Leaving those paintings as they are is against my nature, but keeping going could yield diminishing returns. So far, I have managed to not go beyond the streaming timeframe. Before each painting, I reviewed the decision list from Susan Lyon’s lessons and tried to make my practice more effective. 

From the Portrait Society of America’s auction page, we can see artists do sell their sketches. Who knows, maybe after a million hours of practicing, someday, I will look at my two-hour painting and think, “Yep, that’s a thing.”

Here are some recent sketches I did, most of them are 9 x 12 or 11 x 14 and done within 2.5 hours: