Morning on the Pond I

A Step-by-Step Oil Painting Demonstration

Morning on the Pond I 36 x 36” Oil ©John Hulsey

Like many artists, I have a natural resistance to changing a currently successful technique in favor of something new and unproven. After all, years of hard work have gone into developing my abilities to push paint around into a semblance of what I see in my mind and even more years into developing an audience for it. Lately though, I had been getting the feeling of walking on an artistic treadmill in my work. I needed more challenge, but that meant a certain amount of risk, and who needs more of that in this business? So I dithered for awhile, trying to avoid the downside of change. Restless for artistic growth, I decided to embrace change even if it was uncomfortable or even down right painful.

In the Fall, I had been making abstract photographs of water reflections on my neighbor’s pond, a place where I had once lived and painted. I was quite happy with some of these images as successful photographs, but my…