Thoughts on painting

Good painting is very dependend on good observation. When we grow up as kids, we learn to see what we know and the knowing often gets in the way of seeing ‘right’. We don’t really look, we think we know what it looks like! (i.e. ‘if I paint a car I have to paint four round wheels’)

When I first started painting (longer than I care to admit here), my artistic mind was on the quest for realism. I was obsessed with technique and how to paint this and that. I recorded places verbatim and got lots of encouragement with favorable comments from people around me. “Oh, good job, that looks so real..”etc.
As I grew as an artists, things started to change. I no longer looked to paint something as realistic as possible. The correct and scientific rendering of something before me couldn’t possibly be the goal of my art, I could just take a photograph. I started looking for more, something else. I started seeing how objects relate to each other, how they interact, the quality of light and the interconnectedness of everything on the planet. There just isn’t a ‘car’ on a ‘street’, but the interaction of different entities that relate to each other through light, shadow, color, mood. In short, I became obsessed with light and mood.

The paintings I paint now are more of a visual notation that *imply* reality, hopefully like a poetic statement. The tools of the craft and technique have long moved to the subconscious.
It’s an ongoing process. You never stop learning and it is the truth when I say that every watercolour teaches me something. I am by no means there… maybe I will never be ‘there’, whatever ‘there’ is! As the Zen master teaches us, the journey is the destination.
On that note: back to painting…