"About 30 years," is a reply I once heard from an artist, suggesting years of experience and by implication, talent has more to do with the quality of a painting than how much time expended on it. Despite the logic of this point of view, those who ask this question really want to know the number of hours or days involved in a particular painting. I’m often asked this about “Departure” –a highly detailed scratchart etching depicting the loading of cars and passengers onto a ferry about to depart from Vineyard Haven on Martha’s Vineyard. Well, it took hundreds of hours -extended by eye strain and constant cramping of fingers when using straight pins to produce tens of thousands of scratches. Given this effort I am loathe to dismiss time and effort as irrelevant, but do accede to the maxim -it is not how hard one works but how well that counts. And so it is with art.
