Art teachers tell us that if we want to learn to paint, we have to learn to see. But what does
that mean? Doesn't everybody see about the same? Do artists see differently? The answer is yes:
artists DO see differently and that's the key to painting well. So what I'll do in this video is to
take you through the painting of this wood pile, and as I go through each stage, I'll tell you
what I see in the subject and how that translates into the technique that i'm using with the paint.
Artists don't have different visual equipment they have a different training different things to look
for so for example looking at this wood pile the first thing i want to do is break it down
to a simple shape so i'm reconstructing here after the fact what is in my mind
using a piece of tracing paper over a xerox of the photo. So i'm really trying to create
a mental model with simplified outer shapes so i have something to measure something to hold onto,
That's kind of what i was thinking, but here's what i'm actually doing i'm using the brush,
to paint kind of a wiggly line rather than that simplified triangle. What I'm looking
for in the pile are anchor points so that i can find my way back to those anchor points later.
I'd really like to be able to make a one-to-one correspondence between the forms that are in the
scene and the ones that are in my sketch and to do that I have those anchor points to find
my way back. It is tempting when you're doing a subject like this that's very complex to fall back
on sort of paint early rhythms and shorthands for indicating detail that don't really correspond
one-to-one to what you're looking at so reconstructing again later after the fact
these are some of the details the diagonal pieces of wood the one that sticks out past the line
now it'll help me to paint around the shape with these greens so that i can see it as a whole it's
much easier to evaluate the accuracy of a shape when it's been painted in flat colors against its
background so that's why i'm going in painting the background and the flat color of the firewood pile
Of course I see all the hundreds of variations of tones within the
wood pile itself, but I want to generalize it to a light pale
tan color for the wood, a darker color for the trees, and then a flat gray color for the driveway.
Using that mental model as I lay it in. I put a dark green
color behind the wood pile a gray driveway and then a more or less flat tan color for
the wood pile. Here's what's in my mind as I look at it. I'm picking out these
diagonal pieces of wood that are laying on the pile and trying to lay them in with my brush
with the spacing between them as accurate as i can get them. That way I can fill in between them later.
Even though i'm specific about these individual shapes
I'm still thinking somewhat impressionistically about this meaning i'm almost blurring my eyes
and trying to see it as an overall pile of tone with a few light tones sticking out and then i can
lay some transparent watercolor glazes over that to go down from that high pale
color. One thing that surprises me when I compare my painting to a photo of the subject taken later
is how different the color is, how much color seems to be missing from the photo that I was sure I
was seeing when i was looking at the subject. I don't think there's anything unusual about my eyes;
Everybody probably is able to see these variations of color but it's really obvious to anyone who
paints outdoors how little the camera captures of the colors outside. I'm using by the way
a small number of colors ultramarine blue terra rosa which is like burnt sienna a yellow ochre and
I have azo yellow which is a bright yellow scarlet pearl which is a reddish orange and cerulean blue
i want to make these greens a little darker in the background
to bring forward the light tones of the wood pile
i'm using a large round brush
and just selecting a few details to
bring out i want to show the texture of the leaves in the background so over that middle green area
i'm using the very tip of this big brush to paint the dark spaces between the
leaves. As I proceed through different areas of the picture I kind of train my eyes to look
for different categories of things: the outlines of shapes, the big shapes, the relationships of
the light tones to the dark tones, the details of the bark texture, and the shape of the leaves.
Each time I head out with a different search image to try to find what i'm looking for
This idea of creating mental models to guide your perception is very similar and it's based
on the ideas that are coming from the science of perception for example Robin Carhart Harris
or Donald Hoffman have told us that vision is much less a bottom-up
process where we have large amounts of unfiltered raw information coming up from our
retinas to our brains but it's much more of a top-down process meaning that the brain is
providing us with models of what we're seeing and this is largely unconscious so that it fills in
all the gaps of information that you're seeing with the prediction of what's in front of you
in fact the optic nerve which comes from a retina doesn't really carry very much information just
gives us a few clues and the rest is provided by our brains models of what we're seeing.
Donald Hoffman has gone so far as to say that not only do we see differently as individuals,
but all we really see are our mental models. They're kind of like desktop icons which our brain
constructs to create a representation of the infinite complexity of the world around us.
What makes artistic vision special is not that we have any higher sensitivity to color or
detail but that we can recruit these processes or mental models that are normally unconscious
and make them conscious and deliberate to serve us at each stage of making a picture.
Now at this point I want to carry the tone of the driveway across the picture a little bit more
and leave just those little areas where the blossoms that have fallen down from the oak
trees have gathered up in bunches so i need to come up with a way to suggest those textures
the texture of those light tan bunches of bloss dried up blossoms on the ground
i can mix a little white with yellow ochre
in a fairly dry bit of paint and kind of drag that over the surface of the slightly wet paint
there's always going to be far more detail than you can possibly capture in any given amount of
time so i'm trying to select key aspects of this particular subject the grain of the wood
the cut ends of the wood some pieces that are straight some that are bent
and try to get those characteristic features in a variety of different positions
and hopefully the mind of the viewer will put it all together into a coherent jumble of detail
Learning to paint is only in part about learning to manage brushes and paint. It is
about learning to see and we're lucky to be alive today when so much is being learned about
how our visual perception works. I'll put some links down below with some good podcasts
and some good articles online that talk more about this whole idea of visual perception
now i'm getting closer to the finish and so i'm
just picking out a few areas i want to define a little more carefully
and i'm letting the randomness of the brush strokes kind of fill in for the rest
Most times that I paint I feel that I see a hundred leaves for every one that i paint
and 100 details for every one that i include and that all i'm doing is just painting a few
representative samples of different textures and areas
rather than really representing the whole reality that i see in front of me
but to me that's the magic of painting trying to capture something about the world
and put it in a form someone else can experience richard feynman the great scientist once said that
firewood is a form of stored sunlight and that's what painting is too it captures the heat and
light of the sun and allows other people to experience it in another time and place
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