Paint when you feel it

There’s a lot of advice about consistency. Show up every day. Paint on a schedule. Treat it like a job. And yes—that matters. Discipline matters. But that’s not the whole story.

Some days, you walk into the studio and nothing is there. No pull. No tension. No reason to start. You can still work—and sometimes you should—but it’s not the same as the moments when something is already moving before you even pick up a brush.

That feeling is hard to describe. It’s not an idea. It’s not a plan. It’s more like pressure—something underneath the surface that hasn’t taken shape yet but won’t leave you alone.

That’s when I paint. Not because I’ve decided to. Because I don’t really have a choice.

The work is different when it starts there. It’s less controlled, less careful. You’re not trying to make something good—you’re trying to keep up with something that’s already happening. A mark goes down, and it immediately asks for another. Something shifts, and you respond before you’ve had time to explain it to yourself.

That kind of momentum can’t be manufactured. You can’t schedule it or force it into a clean process. It shows up when it wants to, and when it does, you have to be available for it. It’s closer to what’s often described as flow—a state where attention and action collapse into each other.

This is the part that doesn’t fit neatly into advice about productivity. Because if you wait only for inspiration, you risk doing nothing. But if you ignore it completely, the work starts to flatten out. It becomes efficient. Predictable.

The balance is paying attention—working enough that you’re ready when something shifts, but not so rigid that you miss it when it does. That idea sits right alongside what I talk about in Inspiration: How Does That Actually Happen?.

A lot of that attention has been strengthened through the communities and spaces I continue to learn from, including Art Connect Palm Beach, the Boca Raton Museum Art School, and Arts Warehouse. Being around other artists matters. Seeing how other people work matters. It reminds you that process is rarely clean or linear.

When I feel it, I don’t question it. I don’t try to understand it too early. I start. I let the painting build the way it needs to. Most of the time, I don’t know where it’s going. That’s part of it.

That space—where something is happening but not yet defined—is where the work actually becomes something. It’s the same kind of attention I come back to in Why I Don’t Start With a Plan and in When an Abstract Painting Starts Talking Back. It’s not about control. It’s about staying with what shows up.

Not every painting starts this way. Some are slower. Some take more effort to get moving. But the ones that begin with that pull—the ones where you feel it before you see it—those tend to carry something different all the way through.

You can see it in the surface—in the way decisions stack instead of being placed, in the way the painting holds its own momentum. That layering of response over time is something I explore more directly in Why I Work in Layers: Building History Into Abstract Painting.

So yes, show up. Work regularly. Build discipline. But when you feel it—that moment when something shifts and won’t let go—don’t ignore it.

Start there.

That’s where the real work begins.

You can view available work and recent paintings here: Saatchi Art.