I’ve often heard people say “I am not painting reality I am making a painting”. I’ve never really quite understood what this statement means, because if you are not painting the scene in front of you, what are you painting?
What I’ve come to understand this statement to mean, i.e what the difference between a painting and reality or a photograph of reality is as follows. Reality/ nature, is of course infinite. There is an infinite variety of colours in a bank of trees. There is an infinite number of ripples on a bay of water. An infinite number of pebbles on a beach. The colour gradient from the top of a distant mountain to the bottom at the horizon is impossibly subtle. The edge of the horizon impossibly fine. Infinite shapes on the surface of a rock. Now, you could try and paint all the detail and gradients in a painting, and some do to great effect, but this is close to a photographic representation of a scene, and the more I photograph scenes the more I believe that they are not capturing the reality that I see. The human filter is missing from a photograph, which is the connection we have to a scene. Maybe I’m just lazy, but I don’t see the value in spending the time to detail a scene towards the infinite.
So what is a painting of a scene about? First it is about the mood. All the components, sky, trees, water, mountains for instance, are coloured in relation to one another to capture the mood of a scene. Spend your time in progressing this towards the infinite. I believe these 4 elements as simple shapes with the exact tones could make a good painting. Second is the human touch, don’t hide this, it should be shown. Spend time in making magical marks. Brilliant shapes and articulations of light. The third element of a painting is economy. It is pointless to place every detail of the shadow of a distant mountain. The economy is in synthesizing the larger shapes to read as a distant mountain in relation to the overall scene. It is pointless to render every crack and crevice of a shoreline. The art lies in the ability to represent that shoreline in as few strokes as possible. A painting then, is not reprinting faithfully each and every detail of a scene, rather it is defining the mood of a scene in infinite detail and suggesting enough for the viewer to fill in all the other details.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the paintings.
Stephen