There was a time that I didn't think about the importance of subject, or content, in painting. After forty years I've come to recognize what excites me, what I'm passionate about, and what I need to communicate. All of the learning and practice allows me to communicate my subject in a more clear, understandable way. Below I will describe my slow path on the evolutionary trail of discovering the subject, and its importance.

As a child, real live plants and flowers, animals from any source, and other peoples' pictures that I liked, were my subjects. Dad would get after me about copying, for he could sit down and easily create something from his imagination. But I copied anyway, because I liked to and I'm stubborn. Book House illustrations, Bambie, encyclopaedias, Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam, and Donald Duck comics were all fully plagiarized.
In Junior and High school, evenings were spent copying, but it was sweet, big-eyed, scruffy cats and kids that were popular at the time. They still appear in various renditions, every decade or so. Chalk pastels of still life's, and romance comic characters filled my drawing papers. Mom and Dad bought me my first set of oil paints.

While enrolled in art at university, subjects often came from imagination, fantasy, and "Lord of the Rings" type fairytale images. I have noticed a preference for these subjects by adolescents. Then there were the ones chosen by the instructors, mostly nude figures. Though they weren't real people to me, I couldn't look at or draw the private parts of the male models. We even drew some live chickens which did seem real, myself having grown up on a farm. One of my canvas paintings done in l968, of a little blond-headed girl, the Alice in Wonderland variety sitting under a bunch of mushrooms, was bought by a friend for five dollars. More than ten years later he was to tell me that it was still his favourite.

Through teaching Grade sevens, eights, and nines, exclusively art, I started to learn about drawing, and experienced countless techniques. I was very fortunate to have landed in Terry Allen's progressive school, with an art room so well equipped, I have yet to see its equal. But as well as learning a lot I made a lot of mistakes. In retrospect, not stressing subject matter was a weakness in my teaching.
During this period, I took classes from Stan Blodgett who is a master in water color. I quit teaching to go at painting full time in l976. Subject matter was still not important to me. I tried everything, was into detail, and used photographs a lot.

Then, a strange thing happened. THE SUBJECT STARTED GRABBING ME.

Whereas previously everything seemed new and exciting, now certain subjects stood out taking precedence over others. I had become acutely aware of my own feelings, and was becoming more selective.

As well I realized that I could make conscious decisions to visualize, and work on paintings in my imagination. I now spend hours at it. You can understand the difficulty in answering the question about how long it takes to do a painting! But this whole process of visualization took years to develop and required great concentration to begin with. When a painter stands back to scrutinize the work in progress, he is visualizing the next steps, changing colors and shapes at will.

Subjects in the form of complete works will flash into my head. I can't get rid of these images except by painting them. I assume these occurrences to be a natural progression of the visualization process.