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Creating a painting with hordes of figures engaged in dramatic action takes a lot of planning even if
you don’t take the historical research into account. To begin with, everything I plan to put in the picture
must be photographically documented. Unlike Marc Chagall, I don’t “just paint things out of my head”.
So, when you look at one of my pictures, realize that each figure or building or horse or tree was drawn
and painted from a photo, taken either by me or by someone else. I have a large file of pictures torn
from magazines as well as files of my own photos taken over the years at reenactments, historical sites
and at photo shoots done in the studio or outdoors. Having said that, however, I do feel free to interpret
the photos creatively, rather than copying them exactly as they appear.
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But before I go running around willy-nilly taking pictures, I have to have a plan, a basic idea of my theme
and how I intend to compose a picture around that theme. For this, I sit down with a sketchpad and my
imagination and draw “thumbnail” sketches, so called because they’re very small. These doodles eventually
become enlarged and refined somewhat, but they’re not very detailed - they’re just a simple idea on paper
that helps me see how the finished composition may look. Sometimes I also do a color sketch, especially if
the planned color scheme is unusual or there are atmospheric effects, such as smoke, going into the painting.
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In any case, once I shoot and/or collect all the necessary photos, I then set out to arrange them all into an
effective composition, and to aid me in this task I use a projector to trace all the photographs onto tracing
tissue. Since I usually photograph my figure models one at a time, I arrange these individual figures into
groups of three to five and trace each group onto their own sheet of tracing tissue. This technique allows
me a measure of flexibility in determining the final compositional arrangement on the canvas. It’s a bit like
putting a puzzle together. I tape all these pieces of tracing paper onto the canvas, each overlapping the others,
and shift them around until I’ve gotten a compositional arrangement that works.
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