Bringing the Everyday to Life

Hello Everyone!  Ok, when you are looking at a view on location or at a photograph you would like to paint, how do you choose what is important?  When you are on location, there is so much to choose from it can be overwhelming.  When you are painting from a photograph, you might be compelled to add every detail which can in fact be a detriment.  I tell my plein air students that they should try to pick one thing or area that excites them and this becomes their area of focus.  Their center of interest, or focus of their painting.  I also do this when I paint from photographs.  To illustrate this, I painted two paintings from the same photograph as reference...

This was my reference photo...

Now, I decided there were two things that interested me about this photo.  One was the row of houses along the street and the other was that large tree in the front yard.  For the first painting, I focused on the row of houses.  In order to do that, I had to leave out that large tree.  If I had included the tree just because it was there, it would have dominated the picture and divided it in half as well.  The rhythm of the painting is stronger without the tree.  You can see that I have the houses and even some of the cars and the trailer.  I have added figures of course because that to me adds a narrative element.  I added more telephone poles and designed the trees to fit my composition.  This is one story to tell from my photo.  But there are more...

Village of Julian

In this next painting, I wanted the tree as the main player.  You can see that I have a portrait layout instead of a landscape to help emphasize the size of the tree.  I still have the row of houses, but they are not pure white which diminishes their pull.  The dark tree is now clearly dominate.  I also changed my pallet, giving this painting a warmer feel.  I still have some cars and I added different figures.  I also did not include any telephone poles.  I wanted the tree to be the main, strong vertical.  This is a different story, on a different day.  Do you see how I used the photo for just inspiration.  These are both depictions of the same street, but they are different experiences.  Every painting I paint is a different experience and I enjoy each one.  With each of these paintings, I chose one thing of interest and then used other elements from the photo (and some from my imagination) to help support my main actor. 

Under the Old Oak

Happy Painting!

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