A year ago, I thought my family and I were the only hermits on the face of the earth. It made me uncomfortable and I knew  we had to become more social and get out of our shell.  In the meantime, staying home has become the norm and it somehow even changed into a virtue. So from the comfort of my home I’m wishing you a Happy New Year. Three days late, as in this new state of being, one day is like the next and sleeping through New Year’s Eve doesn’t help in the matter. 

I’ve been a little depressed lately, thinking I’m no further along in my artist career as I was 10 years ago, some might even say, I have regressed. But then, they don’t know anything about painting. The pieces of artwork that stand out to me as “better”, I was only able to paint with considerable forethought and a grid as my guide as I was painstakingly copying the photograph that the watercolor is based on. There is nothing wrong with that. A lot of artists do it with great success. But I wanted to paint. To let the brush do the talking and not put the paint into finely drawn pencil marks. I’m a heck of a lot further in that pursuit now than I was ten years ago. My brushes are the proof of it, as they have lost their point due to much handling this past year. 

I used to say “ I don’t do landscapes” and mainly what I meant was, I don’t know how. Good landscapes require a lot of design, as three well-placed trees look much better than the one hundred trees in front of you, and it’s up to the artist to choose what to include and what to leave out. I’m not saying I’m a good landscape painter, yet, but I’m learning from the best. 

It has been my good fortune last year, that a fellow watercolor artist was selling her life’s collection of art books and I bought some awesome ones from her. 

One of them is John F. “Carlson’s Guide to Landscape Painting”. It was first published in 1929, almost 100 years ago. He mentions how he thinks students waste “three or four valuable years in the “antique class” when three or four months would suffice”, and of course I’m thinking: “Now I know what’s wrong with my paintings-no time in the antique class. But then he comforts me by saying:” The art of painting, properly speaking, cannot be taught, and therefore cannot be learned. Only certain means can be discussed. I believe about art, as I believe about music or architecture, that the only way to study is to practice: and that any good teacher can point out certain intellectual or technical “makings”, certain helps that will give a fulcrum to the lever of practice.”-so there: Just keep painting!

He is on my side, when he says:” I discourage any elaborate drawing-in of the motif to be painted, either with pencil , pen or brush. This produces a fear of the pigment or paint; a kind of dry, joyless “working up to the edges”, and leads subsequently to a kind of “colored drawing”.

And of course, he knows how to put important truths into words when he says the following about painting a lion:”Analyze your impression in order to approach expression and know that what you have created is not great because it suggests a lion, but because it stirs with its beauty of conception the emotions that the lion itself made you feel.”

That is where I want to go in landscape painting:”to stir with its beauty of conception the emotions that being in the landscape made me feel”. 

Since practice is the only way to improve , I want to commit to another 30 days of daily paintings, some current and some from photographs taken last summer when I was out and about with my very first watercolor student, painting on location in this beautiful state of Alaska. Check back here on my website or follow me on instagram.com/renatemartin03/ 

for daily updates. Painting challenge 2021-January 4th-February 2nd.