When I first started painting, one of the first things I did was to take a course on Domestika.org called “Basics of Acrylic Landscape Painting.” I had been painting for about a week or two and, being completely new to it, was pretty unhappy at how thick, gloppy, and gross my paintings were. The minute I sat down in front of this course, and learned how to use water to dilute my paint, I thought to myself “I can do this!”
Although the course instructor is painting a mountain in her class, I decided to paint the tree in my back yard, lit up by the moon. I added a little body of water with a reflection. Here it is, on a 9×12 sheet:
The elements are all there: foreground interest, background, a little bit of light and dark (although the tree needs work). I like the bark, and the yellow haze. Everything’s too centered, though — I’d forgotten the rule of thirds from photography though).
Because I am an overachiever, I decided to make a second painting for the class, with another tree in the foreground, but with a bunch of mountains in the background, an emotional sky, a road through the desert, and a guy not quite in the shade of said tree.
Here it is:
I spent most of the next six months painting a LOT of abstracts and figures, but every once in a while, I returned to landscapes. I painted them on square canvas:
And on rectangular canvases and big wood panels too, sometimes using wild synthetic colors, and other times abandoning reality completely for something a bit surreal:
And of course, there were the pastels, which I made whenever I had the chance (and the people around me didn’t mind the chalky mess):
But what I really loved to do was to build digital landscapes, in a variety of styles (realistic, impressionistic, abstract):
In each piece, what I’m trying to capture is not just the weight of the land and sky, but also the emotion captured. There are infinite ways to capture clouds, sunsets, running water, trees, grass. You’ve got light, shadows, colors, saturation, values, lines, mass, movement.
Living in Colorado these past 4 years has taught me one thing: you can never look at the same mountain twice. The interplay of light, atmospheric haze, precipitation–you name it– will change what you’re looking at moment to moment some days.
In fact, when I think about it, spending an entire lifetime painting what I see in front of me, or using what I see in front of me to create fictitious places, isn’t such a bad life at all.
