A Few Thoughts About Painting One of the true loves of my life is drawing and painting people. Usually I paint people who are involved in the every-day activities we all take part in – such as reading, crossing streets, eating lunch. My goal is to paint a picture that the viewer can easily identify with, something that looks like it could be part of his or her world. To this end, I try to make the figures look as natural as I can with the action as candid as possible. Occasionally people will ask me how I go about painting a picture and they are usually surprised at how much preliminary work is involved. Most of my paintings are the result of an evolutionary process. It is only after several thumbnails, a black-and-white rough, a color sketch and a full-size, detailed pencil drawing that I am ready to begin the actual painting. There are other more direct methods of painting that I enjoy working with in other media. However, there is much more to painting than method and technique. Many early societies thought that an image of a subject had the power to capture its spirit. That is exactly what many artists, myself included, are trying to do. When we are able to capture the spirit of a subject within a painting, we have a picture that can speak to the soul of the viewer. And that’s a lot to shoot for. Paul Sullivan