Here is the result since the last painting post. It’s the view of the cottage that we are staying at. It captures the spirit of the place. Work still needs to be done, but I think I am going to move on. Resolving a painting can take time (for me). Trips go by so quickly. I would like to capture as much as i can, while still retaining some sort of quality. But that is a tricky balance, i always think that I can paint faster than I actually can.

Below is a photo of the view from another angle. There was a lot of foreground foliage that I felt I needed to eliminate. I simplified the foliage as well. Overall the painting is leaning towards a “symbolic” style, rather than a “realist” style. Symbolic depiction emphasizes the idea of things more than “How they actually look”. This can be a major obstacle if you are trying to go for realism, but that is the style that I want in this one.

The anitdote to being trapped in Symbolic representation as your default mode is demonstrated in an exercise made famous by the book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards. The author probably did not invent this technique, but definitely popularized it: You do a drawing from a photo of a man sitting. Then you draw it again looking at it upside down. The drawing done upside down is almost always way better than the one done right side up. Why? Because you are not caught up in the idea of what you are looking at (man, chair, portrait, etc.) and instead are focusing on relative shapes, both positive and negative. You are free from what you think it is and what you think it should look like, and instead are focusing on purely formal visual relationships.

The below painting is done in watercolor and gouache and leans more towards a realism style rather than symbolic. It is a view from the cottage depicted in the other painting, looking up to the house. No, I didn’t hang upside down to achieve that, but I did start with a drawing (instead of launching right into paint) where I am pretty good at capturing proportions, perspective and relative patterns without the crutch of symbolic representation. (Symbolism: If you ask anyone to draw an eye, a house and the sun in 30 seconds, almost everyone will come up with similar “icons” that we will all understand. That is symbolic representation in a nutshell.)

A photo of the view. The camera on my phone really forces perspective and squishes things. At some point I will talk more about Photo vs. Observation, by the day is spectacularly sunny and I want to get out there.

Symbolic vs. Realism