From a Feeling to a Finished Painting — How My Work Actually Gets Made

People at festivals often ask me how long a painting takes. The honest answer is: it starts long before I pick up a brush, and often in a place thousands of miles from my studio.

There's a question I get asked more than almost any other when I'm showing work at an art festival. Someone stands in front of a painting for a while, looks at me, and asks: "How do you even start something like this?"

It's the question I find hardest to answer quickly, because the truthful answer is that a painting rarely starts where people expect it to. It doesn't start with a blank canvas and a brush. It doesn't start with a photograph I'm trying to reproduce. It starts with something much less tangible — a feeling that needs somewhere to go.

I've been painting long enough now to trust that process, even when it resists being explained neatly. So here's my best attempt at walking you through it — from the moment something catches somewhere inside me, to the finished piece that eventually ends up on a wall.

It starts with a feeling, not an image

I don't begin a painting by deciding what it will look like. I begin by identifying what I want it to feel like. There's a difference, and it matters enormously to how the work comes out.

The feeling usually arrives from somewhere specific — a place I've been, a quality of light I encountered, an atmospheric moment that struck me as containing something worth holding onto. Maybe it's the particular heaviness of the air before a coastal storm. Maybe it's the way a landscape opens up unexpectedly when you crest a hill. Maybe it's something quieter — the stillness of water at a certain hour, the sense of being somewhere vast and unhurried.

What I'm chasing when I paint isn't a record of how a place looked. It's a record of how a place felt. That distinction is what pushes my work toward atmosphere and abstraction rather than strict representation — I'm not trying to show you the place. I'm trying to put you back inside the feeling of being there.

How travel feeds the work — sometimes years later

This is the part that seems to surprise people most when I explain it at festivals. They look at a finished painting and assume there's a fairly straight line between going somewhere and making work about it. In reality, the line is rarely straight and often very long.

Travel fills a kind of reservoir. I'm not consciously collecting material when I'm moving through a place — I'm just present, paying attention, letting things register. But those experiences don't disappear. They settle somewhere and wait. A light I saw on a coastline years ago might resurface when I'm standing at my easel working on something completely different, and suddenly I know exactly what the painting needs.

I keep notes — not detailed sketches or technical observations, but impressionistic jottings. A word or two about a colour. A sentence about how a place made me feel. The angle of light at a specific time of day. These aren't references in the traditional sense. They're more like prompts to memory, ways of keeping the door open to an experience long after I've left.

When I'm working on a coastal piece or a landscape, I'm almost always drawing on several different memories and experiences layered together — not a specific place faithfully rendered, but a composite of places and feelings that together add up to something true.

Studio work and painting outdoors — two different conversations

I work in both environments, and they produce genuinely different results — not in quality, but in character.

In the studio, I have control. I can work slowly, make decisions deliberately, return to a piece over days or weeks. The studio is where the more resolved, complex work tends to happen — where I can take an atmospheric feeling and develop it into something fully realized. There's a kind of sustained conversation that happens in that space between me and a canvas, and I value it.

Painting outdoors is something else entirely. You lose control almost immediately — the light changes, the wind moves, conditions shift — and that loss of control forces a kind of immediacy and decisiveness that you simply can't manufacture in a studio. The marks are more instinctive. The colour choices happen faster. There's an aliveness to outdoor work that I find difficult to replicate otherwise.

The two feed each other. Outdoor work loosens my hand for the studio. Studio work deepens what I'm able to do when I'm painting outside. After years of moving between them, I've stopped thinking of one as more legitimate than the other — they're different tools for different conversations with the same material.

What actually happens when I start a canvas

I don't sketch out a composition first. I find that process too constraining — it commits me to a plan before I know what the painting wants to be. Instead I usually begin with broad, loose marks that establish a general sense of tonal structure. Dark against light. Where the weight of the composition will sit. Where air and space need to breathe.

From there, the painting starts to speak back. Something that felt right in my head doesn't work on canvas, and I adjust. A colour relationship that I hadn't anticipated appears, and I follow it. This is the part of making work that is genuinely impossible to fully plan or describe — it's a dialogue, not a monologue, and the most interesting paintings are the ones where I end up somewhere I didn't expect to go.

A lot gets painted over. This surprises people too. Some of my finished pieces have three or four earlier paintings underneath them — entire compositions that didn't resolve, that got covered and reworked until something true finally emerged. That's not failure. That's the process. The painting you see in my collection is often the last in a series of attempts that taught me what it needed to be.

How I know when a painting is finished

This might be the hardest question in painting, and I'm not sure anyone ever fully solves it. My working answer is this: a painting is finished when it has stopped asking me for more and started asking the viewer for something instead.

An unfinished painting is still pulling me in — there's a nagging sense of incompletion, of something not yet resolved. A finished one is different. It becomes self-contained. It has its own internal logic. When I stand back and it stops making me think about what's wrong with it and starts making me feel the thing I was originally trying to capture, I know it's done.

I also have a rule I've learned to follow: when I think a painting is almost finished, I stop and leave it for at least a day. Fresh eyes the next morning reveal things that hours of close attention will hide from you. More than once that pause has saved me from overworking something that was already right.

Why I think the process matters to collectors

I've noticed over the years that people who understand something about how a painting was made have a different relationship with it. They're not just looking at a finished object — they're seeing through it, catching glimpses of the decisions and experiences and feelings that produced it.

That's one of the reasons I started writing about my process more openly. When someone buys a painting or a print and knows something of where it came from — the place that seeded it, the feeling I was chasing, the months it took to resolve — they're not just buying an image. They're buying a piece of a larger story. I think that connection is part of what makes original art — and art that comes directly from an artist rather than through a mass-market channel — worth having on a wall.

If you're curious about a specific piece — where it came from, what I was working through when I made it — I'm always happy to talk about it. Browse the current collection at brienberberichart.com, and feel free to reach out directly. The story behind a painting is part of the painting.

— Brien Berberich

Contemporary artist working in atmospheric landscapes, coastal scenes, and abstraction. Original paintings and museum-quality giclée prints at brienberberichart.com