Arguably the most important moments in an artist’s development results from flashes of insight into the inner workings of creativity.
If you study painting (or any art) long enough, at some point you’ll encounter the work of another whose heart and soul you seem to fully grasp, all at once, in a flash. Many great and excellent paintings will not affect you like this. But one day, you’ll see an artist’s work in a new light and just “get it” on a whole new level.
Winslow Homer (1836–1910), Weatherbeaten, 1894, oil on canvas, 28 1/2 x 48 3/8 inches. Bequest of Charles Shipman Payson, 1988.55.1. Image courtesy of Luc Demers via Portland Museum of Art
It’s as if the artist is speaking directly to you, from their own secret inner world to yours, through the work. All at once you understand what artists really do: how they capture and transform life itself into a physical form that you can see and touch.
Whether it happens for you only once, twice, or multiple times, this extraordinary, intimate connection with the art and inner life of a great artist changes everything. It realigns your ideas about what art is, why people make it, and how artistic creativity works on its most basic, foundational level.
A master like Turner, for example, might at first seem bizarre, wild, even beautiful and obviously “great.” But only if you dig deeper into his life and career do you begin to see Turner’s art from Turner’s point of view. Then you start to see the important choices he made that led from apprenticeship to mastery.
There is no completely original art. Turner’s work is so unlike what came before, it seems as if it could have burst into life out of nowhere. But realize that Turner loved watercolor and applied the principles of watercolor to oil painting; see how his seascapes have their roots in an early fascination with Dutch Golden Age maritime painting; understand the artist’s restless progression from imitation to active re-imagination.
Left, a typical example of Dutch maritime painting, A Dutch Ship in a Storm, by Matthieu van Plattenberg, mid 17th century – Right, an early painting by JMW Turner, Dutch Boats in a Gale, 1801
Seeing where he was coming from in his early, derivative work, you’ll understand and appreciate all the more the transcendent, semi-abstract (and very un-Dutch) light- and storm-scapes Turner made later in life. Turner treated the “old masters” as springboards for the spirit – but he needed those masters!
JMW Turner, Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, exhibited 1842
Arguably the first step to “finding your voice” as an artist is finding a Master whose work you’re drawn to. Of course, study the techniques they use to make their work sing. But don’t stop there – how it’s done is important, but it’s only half of what that artist can teach you.
Ask yourself why you love an artist’s work as well as admiring the artist’s skill. It’s important for your own creative growth to enter imaginatively into the inner life of other creators, their “motive” (motif) for painting. Mentally connecting technique with artistic impulse spurs on your own resolve to create work that’s expressly your own.
Do some serious poking around: watch videos, read online interviews and show reviews. Read the artist’s statement and the website bio. Read whole books about your favorite artists. Get in front of the work you love in person and just look, think and feel what you feel. Admire the lines, the color, the styling, but also look under the hood, so to speak. Step back from fascination with the surface and engage with what the work is “doing”; see if you can trace some of the inspiration and the emotion, ideas, and imagination that drove these creative decisions and not others.
Vincent Van Gogh, Sunflowers repetition of the 4th version (yellow background), August 1889. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Treat individual artists’ techniques as welcome signposts on a long journey: “Faith,” said theologian A. J. Heschel, “is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.”
All artists have always copied and stolen from each other. There’s no shame in copying others’ work as you learn the basics of how it’s done, nor should anyone feel at all icky about incorporating aspects of others’ work into their own.
Just remember, as Matisse suggested (“emulate the effort, not the results”), to sense your way into the thoughts and feelings behind the work as well as understanding the technique necessary to lock in the results that blow you and everybody else away.
John MacDonald, Greylock, July Haze, oil, 9 x 12 inches.
Ready to learn how to bring your work alive with feeling? Painter John MacDonald teaches his students how to approach painting “poetically.” Consider downloading John’s video, Poetic Landscapes today.
Tatiana Roulin wins Best Nocturne in monthly Salon
Tatiana Roulin, Moonlit Meadow, oil, 9×12 inches
Tatiana Roulin’s 9×12 oil painting, Moonlit Meadow, has won the top prize in the “nocturnes” category of the monthly PleinAir Salon.
Enter your best work today in the PleinAir Salon, which rewards artists with over $33,000 in cash prizes and exposure of their work, with the winning painting featured on the cover of PleinAir(TM) Magazine. The next deadline is soon, so visit PleinAirSalon.com to learn more.
