How Long Does A Painting Take?

I'm often asked, "How long does it take you to paint a painting?"  That's really hard to answer because as I'm reflecting and trying to gather that information I come up with this missing chunk of time.

Madeleine L'Engle in her book Walking on Water, Reflections on Faith and Art offers and interesting explanation.  We are all familiar with chronos time, as in "chronological", the ticking of the clock.  But she suggests another type of time called kairos or "real time...that time which breaks through chronos with a shock of joy, that time we do not recognize while we are experiencing it, but only afterwards...in kairos we are completely unself-conscious and yet paradoxically far more real than we can ever be when we are constantly checking our watches."

It seems to me that artists work in this kairos time, totally absorbed in the act of creation, losing self-consciousness for the duration, becoming more themselves as a result.

All that to say, the time it takes to complete a painting totally depends on the painting, of course.  But for a concrete example...here is a painting I started yesterday.  It went from a white 16x20 inch canvas to this in about 4 hours minus the various interruptions supplied by my three children.

As you can see, he still has no eyes.  He did have eyes at one point, until I realized that I'd gotten the face shape wrong.  I never knew how few steps away Uncle D's face was from Fidel Castro's...cuz that's who it looked like before it got the turp wipe!

This painting has a few hours of work left...tree branches in the background, eyes, glasses, flowers, and then tiny little details to make certain parts stand out.  I'll let you know the total hours when I finish.