How long does it take most aritist to finnish a painting?

It varies...I tend to paint in what my artist friends call a "marathon sesson" where I paint for eight or so hours without stopping until the painting is almost complete...then I might touch up some areas the next day that were overlooked. Other artist will be much more disiplined and they will only spend a couple hours a day on a canvas thus they will finish it in more time, but they still will end up spending as much time painting but over a longer period of days. It also can varay a lot depending on the physical size of the canvas, and as you may guess the bigger the canvas the longer the artist has to spend on covering that size with paint. It is something that is so elemental but as an artist myself when I worked on a four foot by nine foot canvas I didn't realize this factor until I was well into it. That canvas took me a month to finish. I painted on it every day too, but I was working on detail and I used quarter inch wide brushes so you can figure that it took a long time to cover that much area with that small of a brush. Needless to say, I haven't gone back to painting on that big of a canvas again.