Why I paint slowly
Studio · November 2025
Why I paint slowly
People ask why I make so few paintings. The honest answer is that I make as many as I can. The slower answer is that slowness is not a method I chose — it is a method the paintings chose for me, the first time I tried to finish one before it was ready and watched it die.
A painting made fast is a performance. A painting made slowly is an argument with time, and time is the only honest opponent a picture has. Oil paint dries from the outside in. A glaze laid today will not show its true colour for two weeks. To paint in oil is to conspire with a process that will not be hurried, and the painting that respects its own drying is the painting that lasts.
We are drowning in images and starving for looking. A handful of paintings, made slowly and looked at often, are worth more than thousands scrolled past.
I keep, at any moment, four or five panels going, each at a different stage of wet. While one dries, I look at another. The studio is a slow rotation, a small clock of its own. Some panels take a year. One took three. I do not apologise for that. The price of a slow painting is that there are few of them, and the value of a slow painting is that there are few of them, and those two facts are the same fact.