How Long Did That Take You? The Question I've Learned to Answer Differently

Someone asked me this at my last pop up. They were standing in front of Sharpshooter, looking at it the way people look at paintings when they're deciding whether they want it, and they asked it the way people always do — politely, genuinely, with this faint hope that I'll say "an afternoon" and the math will close neatly in their head.

"How long did that take you?"

For years I gave the boring, technically true answer. A few sessions. Maybe eight, ten hours of actual brush time. And that number was accurate. What it missed was everything.

Here's the thing about oil painting and time: the two don't map cleanly onto each other. A study I knocked out in two hours might carry more life than a painting I labored over for three weeks. And a painting that reads as immediate and gestural — loose marks, visible energy — might actually be the result of putting it down, walking away, coming back, scraping a whole section, and starting that section again.

Sharpshooter is oil on canvas. A western figure. The way the light catches the hat brim and goes quiet in the shadow underneath it, the stillness in the whole composition — that stuff took time. Not because I was working slowly, but because that kind of stillness requires the painter to sit with the thing. To keep asking: is this alive yet?

There's a version of the question that's really asking something else. What they actually want to know, I think, is: is this worth what it costs? Which is a fair thing to wonder. And the honest answer isn't about hours. It's about the years of paintings I made before that one that nobody ever asked about. The ones in the corner of the studio. The ones I painted over. The ones that came out wrong in exactly the way that eventually taught me what right feels like.

Picasso had a version of this. Someone watched him finish a drawing in minutes, tried to buy it for a few dollars. He said it took him forty years. That sounds like a brush-off until you've actually been doing this long enough to know it's completely literal.

Here's what eight hours of brush time in a painting like Sharpshooter actually involves: a lot of decisions. Every edge in that painting — every place where the figure meets the background, every transition from light into shadow — was a choice. Do I drag this edge soft or leave it crisp? Do I scumble across here to knock it back or let it sit? Do I put one more pass of warm light on that shoulder or does more paint make it worse?

Those decisions don't feel slow while you're making them. But they're accumulating. And they're accumulating against a kind of internal record of every painting you've made before. The painting goes fast when the record is loaded. It goes slow when there's something you don't yet know how to do.

The other variable is oil itself. When you're working in layers — which is how I usually work on figure paintings — you're also working against drying time. You put down a passage, and then you leave it. You do something else. You come back. That waiting is part of the process, not a flaw in it. Fat over lean. Each layer has to flex less than the one below it, or the paint cracks. So the hours in front of the canvas are only part of what a painting actually costs in time.

I've been trying to answer the question more honestly lately. Something like: a few weeks of studio time, but I've been building toward being able to make that painting for about fifteen years.

People usually nod at that. Some of them hear it. The ones who really get it are usually the ones who do something with their hands — who cook seriously, or build furniture, or play an instrument — because they already understand that the visible thing is never really the whole story of how it was made.

If you want a reproduction of Sharpshooter, prints start at $28 unframed. That's a real way in. If you're the person who wants the actual object — the one with the actual paint from the actual brush, where you can see the marks and the decisions — find it here.

But either way, the time it took is in there. You can see it if you know where to look.