How I like to paint

I enjoy looking at good paintings done in many variations, but some are closer to my heart. I am learning that I don't like it when my paintings get too detailed and descriptive. Realism is kind of important, by that I mean the perspective is right, a tree looks like a tree, and a person looks like a person, not crude. At the same time, I don't want to be painting a tree by describing its every branch and leaf; I want to paint the tree by how it reflects light. By that I mean when I paint the tree, I want to think 'light', not 'tree'. Sargent painted the shapes of light as the subject reflected it, and he made it look easy. A satin dress was not a satin skirt, it was a purple shape in the shadow, and a cool white shape in the light, and after a few strokes it's done (likely very slowly and carefully), and looked exactly like satin, and that's poetry.

Poetry is graceful, purposeful and should not be too literal. It should be like a book with many possibilities in the beginning, but not too vague to lose the readers in the first chapter.

Painting out doors is important to me, simply because I can't paint indoors very well. I am not a very imaginative person and nature takes the guessing game out of painting. When I was sitting on a stump by the river in the below painting, my eyes showed me all these bright purples on the top-facing planes of the sun-bleached logs; the sandy edges of the river was a dark warm reddish purple with streaks of blue of sky reflection. My eyes told me to cover the large grass area quickly and evenly, as there's not much important information there... Nature would present everything I needed in front of me, and I just had to be receptive, know how to read her, and dance with her, sometimes I lead, sometimes she leads.

Water way at Iona Island - oil on panel - 6" x 8"