There’s a question artists get asked all the time: What do you do while you paint?
The obvious answer is, well, paint.
But painting is a strange occupation because you can spend six or eight or twelve hours in a room working on something that might move forward by what appears to be about three inches. There are stretches that require absolute concentration, but there are also countless hours of mixing, glazing, blending, correcting, repainting, and doing the wonderfully repetitive work that slowly turns an idea into a finished painting.
So what do we do during all those hours?
We listen.
At least in our studios, we listen to audiobooks all the time.
I probably go through a book every five days. At that rate, you start measuring paintings not only in hours or days, but in books. There are paintings I can look at and immediately remember the story I was listening to while I made them. A particular corner of a painting can somehow bring back a character, a scene, or the narrator’s voice.
It’s funny how completely the two things can become connected.
Right now, in mid-September, I’m listening to A Trade of Blood, the third book in a series whose first two books I listened to last year. I also listened to the entire Dungeon Crawler Carl series last year and, because apparently once wasn’t enough, I listened to the first two books again this past month in preparation for a trivia night with my book club.
And yes, I love Carl and Donut.
Actually, mostly Donut.
The Books of Summer
Since summer, the studio has been filled with books. Here are some of the ones that have accompanied paintings over the past few months:
The Wayfinder, A Trade of Blood, The Aeronauts Windlass, Dungeon Crawler Carl and Carl's Doomsday Scenario. I also physically read (with my eyes) a book called The Vegetarian by South Korean author Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature--deservedly so, it was incredible.
Looking at the list all together is a little ridiculous. But when you spend as many hours painting as we do, there is an enormous amount of time for someone to tell you a story.
And I think all of that listening inevitably makes its way into the work.
Not necessarily literally. I don't finish a fantasy novel and suddenly decide the next painting needs a dragon in it. It's subtler than that.
Books change the atmosphere in the studio. They introduce ideas and places and personalities you wouldn't have encountered otherwise. They make you think about pacing, humor, suspense, relationships, loss, absurdity, and the million different ways someone can tell a story.
Painting, especially the kind of painting we are interested in, isn't all that different.
You are trying to make someone stop.
Then you're trying to make them curious.
Then, if you're lucky, you're giving them enough information to begin imagining a story of their own.
Last year we actually turned that relationship between books and paintings into an exhibition called From the Pages. Artists created paintings inspired by books, stories, characters, and the experience of reading itself. It was fascinating to see how differently each artist approached the idea. Some connections were immediately recognizable; others felt more like a distant echo of the book that inspired them.
I loved that show because it made visible something that happens in artists' studios all the time.
The things we consume become part of the things we create.
Music does it. Movies do it. Conversations do it. Travel does it. The people we love certainly do it.
And books do it constantly.
There's also something particularly wonderful about audiobooks for painters because they allow two different parts of your brain to be occupied at once. Your hands and eyes can be completely immersed in the physical problem of making a painting while another part of you is wandering through a completely different world.
Somewhere around hour four, you can genuinely forget you're standing in front of an easel in a paint-covered shirt.
You're on another planet.
Or solving a murder.
Or living through some sweeping historical epic.
Or, in my case lately, hanging out with a talking Persian cat named Princess Donut while trying to remember enough completely useless Dungeon Crawler Carl facts to defeat my friends at trivia.
Then you pause the book, step back from the easel, and realize that somehow another little piece of the painting got finished while you were gone.
Maybe that's one of my favorite things about making art for a living.
You spend your days creating worlds while simultaneously getting to disappear into someone else's.
And every once in a while, the two worlds find each other on the canvas.
