Placement of objects on the canvas or paper is crucial. For the mood of the piece to be calm, I usually center the objects. When I want a feeling of tension, I organize the elements to create the correct balance between them. I may spend as much time on the relationship between the objects as I do painting. Color is essential to my painting. For a still life, I start with the color of the elements and then introduce the background color or pattern that will interact well with them, With a portrait, the color of their eyes is important, but there are also many color gradations in a person’s skin tones and I spend a lot of time replicating those. It is important to connect the color in the figure to the background. The sitter must be part of the whole. Sometimes the background is calm but other times it includes many colors or a pattern, whatever suits the composition. The painting is a gestalt.