S omeone once gave me, in a single sentence, the key to improving as an artist: just keep looking, thinking, and painting.
Deceptively simple, that three-part formula of looking, thinking, and painting may be the best motto or rallying cry you can adopt if you want to become the very best painter you can be.
The meaning of these three words – and how these processes work together and support each other – deepens the longer you think about it.
Looking can mean seeing like an artist, but also just looking at paintings both contemporary and historical, all the time. It means seeing the world and the things in it differently the more you paint and the more you think about what you’re painting, why, and how.
The more you think about composition, the more you make paintings from life, the more your way of seeing changes – the easier it gets to simplify with big shapes, for example, and arrange shapes effectively on your canvas.
Looking also means watching and learning how master painters do what they do, closely analyzing paintings you like, and understanding why good paintings work and how their painters create them.
Lisa Egeli, the Long Walk, oil, 16×20 inches
Thinking can mean thinking about painting – what it is, why we do it, and how to do it well – but also thinking about your subject and your painting, before, during, and after you work. Ideas flood the mind right from the get-go; do you follow your first impulse or discard it in favor of the second or third perhaps more interesting thought that occurs to you?
Painting demands the application of many techniques you must learn, forget, and reinvent time and again. And painting intuitively is a mental process of continuously asking what if? What if I changed the horizon line or added a tree to this foreground? What if I changed the color or took just one of the flowers out of this still life – what new creative possibilities emerge?
Painting, because moving that brush is the only way you’ll synthesize what you’ve learned, seen, and discovered.
Lisa Egeli, A Story of Tides, oil, 14″ x 24″
Seascape master Frederick Waugh (1861-1940) said something similar in his breakdown of the painting process: “observations, concentration, then application.” And his contemporary, Charles Herbert Woodbury. wrote “Clear sight, clear thought, clear expression; the thought should depend on the sight, and the expression on the thought.” Sight, thought, and expression = looking, thinking, and painting.
Woodbury ran a popular outdoor painting school in Ogunquit, Maine for the first 40 years of the twentieth century. He was perhaps the first teacher to formalize a practical method of emphasizing feeling as well as teaching academic skills in plain-air painting.
Lisa Egeli, Good Things Come, oil, 18″ x 36″
Painting is a wild and surprising adventure, or can be. Whatever, you do, keep looking, thinking, and painting.
All the work in this issue is by Lisa Egeli, a master-painter of the sea, among other subjects. If you’d like to dive into her process, download her video, Painting the Sea.
Getting “Past the Nerves” at a Plein Air Event |
| By Terry Miura |
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| Terry Miura, “Corner at the Plaza,” oil on linen, 9 x 12 in. |
| “Corner at the Plaza” was the first painting I did during the 2017 Sonoma Plein Air Festival. After checking in for the event and saying hello to fellow painters, it was time to get to work.
When I participate in plein air events like this, I try not to drive around too much on the first day. I feel like I have stage fright and I just have to get something on my canvas as quickly as possible. If I get in my car and start driving in search of the perfect view, I grow more and more anxious and pretty soon, I’m cursing “there’s nothing to paint!” After all these years and countless plein air events under my belt, the first painting still makes me uncomfortably nervous. Knowing that there are so many great painters in the event probably doing amazing things while I’m dealing with my nerves doesn’t help, either. Read the rest of this article here. |
