“Wild Oxlips”, oil on panel 5 x 7 inches
This painting is currently at auction. Click here to bid.
Every morning, I pile the kids into the car and we head off to school.
Despite the chaos, I treasure this part of my day.
I get to spend some time with my boys. They’re hilarious and they make me laugh, without fail, every morning.
I also get to drive through the breathtakingly beautiful countryside that we live in the heart of.
Familiarity
Familiarity is supposed to breed contempt, apparently. Not for me, not here.
True, I am becoming more familiar with our surroundings now. I’m not as thrown by the beauty of it as I was when we first came here just over a year ago.
But it still moves me. I think that’s partly because I make a mental effort to notice it, every morning.
I don’t want to get too used to it, I don’t want to get complacent about it.
I want always to remember how special it is, the sacrifices we made to get here, the uncertainty we faced – still face, every day.
I watch the seasons change here and I’m learning the rhythm.
Spring brings the early wild flowers; snowdrops, oxlips and cherry blossom. Summer bings heather and roses. Autumn brings long shadows, that special light and Gloucestershire apples and pears. Winter brings frost and snow-days at home with the kids when we can’t get the car out.
For me, it’s enough.
It’s more than enough. It fills me up completely. Just what’s in front of me. It’s really all I need.
Paint what you feel
Once, a long time ago, I was walking through the impressionists room in the National Gallery in London.
A teacher was there with her class of young kids. As I passed her she gestured at the paintings in the room and said loudly (I suspect so that the whole room could hear):
It’s much harder to paint what you feel than what you see!
My immediate reaction was sadness for those kids.
Quite apart from the fact that it was a room of impressionist paintings (by painters who were avowedly trying to get closer to what they saw) I don’t believe there’s any such dichotomy.
Seeing does not preclude feeling.
I think that teacher was perpetuating a myth about painting, a script that we’ve been lead to follow so often that it’s become like wallpaper. It’s so familiar that we don’t notice it, even though it’s right in front of us.
The script says that the way to paint what you feel is to disregard what you see. As if our perception is a kind of tyranny that we must escape if we’re to create anything meaningful, anything truly felt.
But when I look around at nature, at what I’m surrounded with, when I bring some small part of it into my studio to paint, when I study it in its finest detail, how the light falls on it, how its colours change, when I try to recreate that, to find a way to give it life on the flat surface of my little panel, when I struggle to create something that lives – I am feeling, and deeply.
I feel love for this place, love for the things I choose to paint that I find here. Love for the wonderful people I’ve met and new friends I’m making here. It all moves me profoundly.
I am painting what I feel.
I am painting what’s meaningful to me, just by painting what’s in front of me.
And it’s enough.
Best wishes and thanks for reading,
Paul
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It’s interesting that you chose to use that flower as a close-up detail, paul- it was what struck me when i saw the painting. So three-dimensional! Excellent work, and I look forward to your next posts.
I am a kindred spirit in the love of nature and the local environment. Your appreciation of the beauty of simple, natural things shines through in your work. I admire your mastery at capturing the play of light on your subject.
Thank you for your thoughtful posts.
This post actually brought tears to my eyes. When I looked at this painting, each petal is so lovingly depicted one can feel the awe you must have felt painting it. I love painting what I see. I have taken so many workshops with teachers to have told me not to try and be so exacting; just ‘suggest’ it and then show me books of impressionists or current artists who, yes, are amazingly talented, but are not painting the way I feel I want to paint. I even dropped out of one online class when the teacher posted two paintings, one realism, one very impressionistic and asked, “Now which would you want hanging on the wall? ANYONE can paint what they see….so impressionism is more interesting.” Wow. Really? I wish I could paint what I see!!! I quit as that was clearly not the teacher for me. Thank you for this post.
Elizabeth,
Good for you for dropping that class! Any “instructor” who can’t respect alternate viewpoints (Realism vs. Impressionism), isn’t worth wasting one’s valuable time!
Hi, Paul,
You had an interesting comment about the Impressionists and their change of vision.
I read “The Lives of the Impressionists” a few years ago, and came away with the realization that a non-artistic commonality of that group was lifetime allowances from family wealth as younger sons. They did not expect to work and older brothers had the responsibilities of maintaining the family fortune. The Impressionists could spend long hours in the coffee houses because they could afford to paint without selling to pay rent. Even when the allowance did not actually come through, they had the expectation that it would and friends rich enough to tide them over.
And now I live on a reasonable pension, so I have the freedom to hang out with artists and paint whatever I want. Maybe baby boomers’ guaranteed pensions will be the stimulus for the next new waves of art styles?
Jean 🙂
Amazing, I love it!
Beautifully, and correctly, expressed Paul as ever. You know there is a Ruskin quote for every occasion but I think this one is particularly apt: “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.”
Keep up the good work.
Great post!
Beautiful painting. Wonderful post.
I look forward to seeing your paintings. I appreciate your thoughtfulness both in your art work but also in your comments. You are a very generous teacher of ideas. Thank you
“It’s much harder to paint what you feel than what you see!”
Of course this is true.
Picasso said: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
It’s not because you are a rapresentational painter that you have to belittle modern art.
One of the stupider fallacies of modernism.
John, I think you misinterpret what Paul is saying. To call something to be true it must be an absolute and there is no such thing in the art world. Just saying!
Helga
Not absolute beauty? I think there is! Who does not admire a J.S. Sargent work? Or a work by Sir Alfred J. Munnings?
As well as the true beauty Paul Foxton’s ‘Wild Oxlips’?
Your painting is so beautiful, Paul. Every piece an extension of who you are.
It does sadden me that those who don’t paint, think they know what art is.
How can we not express our feelings and emotions in our work. It’s an extension of who we are. It’s the emotion of the expression that draws one into the painting. It’s the same emotion that moves one to tears just by looking at a beautiful still life or a landscape or portrait. Our heart and souls are encapsulated into every piece we paint. In the Baha’i faith it is believed that painting is an act of worship, celebrating our divine connection to our Maker.
I so agree with you Paul! It’s unfortunate that a teacher, of all people, would make such a remark to those in her charge. Much harder to paint what you feel, huh? Painting, even when the project does not come out quite the way one would hope, is still a joyful process. I, too, am not ‘just’ painting an object. I am painting what I see, what I feel, what I sense, and just trying the best I can to capture a mood and convey a sense of what I am seeing and feeling about the subject. I try and tell a ‘story’ and get all of that across. You, Paul, do that extremely well and I appreciate each post!
You said in your email that you are reading The Story of Art by Gombrich. I have to laugh because I just started that book a few days ago. I haven’t gotten too far into it yet. I have to keep reminding myself about when it was written to get over the utter lack of female context. I pretty certain that its not going to get any better through out the rest of the book. 😐
Another beautiful piece, all the more amazing when one considers that this painting is 5 x7 inches–almost a miniature. I have very rarely been able to paint smaller-than-life set-ups. I wonder if you might address the technique involved in painting small still-lifes in Learning-to-See.
Thanks for keeping me inspired.
I agree with addressing how to effectively do such small works, especially the types of brushes you use for that.
I agree, Paul, but you have to be a painter to understand this.
I love your posts – and that painting is beautiful and moving.
Paul—
EXACTLY! Your post captures why I quit art school in the 70s—“paint what you feel UNLESS you feel love for what you see”. I see something and love it, and painting makes me see it and love it all the more deeply. So few people look, and cherish, the world around them! Truly seeing is an art in itself. Beautiful painting! 🙂
I was in Architecture school in the late 70s and considered an art minor or maybe a double major, but the state of art instruction was dismal…and the “Art World” was abstract and insane.
Our painting instructor was dripping colored wax on things, the life drawing instructor was one of those abstract welded-steel devotees, and the photography guy was off shooting porn in NYC.
I minored in History instead…
I guess it’s horses for courses. If you are happy painting in whatever style you do and if you earn your living doing it and your paintings sell in sufficient numbers to provide that living, then great, within the bounds of decency of course.
To be able to record accurately what is there, in terms of form and colour, is, in my opinion, a gift. Whether you are born with it or have to work at it to achieve it ….. the 10,000 hours theory. (I probably have another 9,000 hours to go!). I believe that even if you want to paint ‘off piste’ you need to serve an apprenticeship with your eye and a pencil. Most great artists did.
But would not the world be the poorer without artists like Picasso and Van Gough, arguably the greatest of them all. Look at how Turner’s work changed over his lifetime. Art galleries are an invaluable source of learning.
Art is a journey. It’s up to the individual artist where that journey takes them.
Another of Gombrich’s books worth a read is ‘The Image and the Eye’.
I love this- you wrote exactly what I feel, but more eloquently.
Thank you for this great post. I do believe that one can only get really good at something if you love what you’re doing.
I think you’re dead on right. If we paint what we see how can we not also paint what we feel. But I think another insidious belief pattern that seems to also emerge lately in realist art is that unless we paint what we can recognize as “real” the effort is not valid or the result is not beautiful. I have to believe that as long as we paint with feeling and intention then the result is success, abstract or realist.
Could be what the museum instructor meant to say is art differs from mechanical atelier drafting– which is, to me, my current torturous apprenticeship : ) This aversion may well be my eyes, or the visionary interpretation of how I see. Photographic realism without the spark of interpretation is about as one dimensional as a piece of sheet music. A starting point. An eloquent creation. There us so much more to infuse into the static spots and lines and shapes on a piece of paper. It takes hard work to do this.
Dear Paul, I think we are here in the philosophical realm and these questions are quite difficult. As I see it, the idea of opposing feeling and seeing is a very old idea and dates back at least to Antiquity and Plato’s Theory of Form. It is a very strange and powerful one and an artistic aim to uncover these forms can be understood. Even if some people fail to give it an elegant formulation as did the guide. We should view it as one of the perspectives possible. At least, it has been enriching two thousand years of thinking. Personally, I would definitely choose like you and many modern philosophers both feeling and seeing because I wouldn’t want to cut myself from the beauties of this world.
Agreed, artistic feeling and seeing are as one. Am consistently amazed/dismayed by judgmental views of either-or, and encounter it quite often. Discipline and hard work are the foundation of creativity. Learn and forget is an ancient (martial) art adage – it is the gift of seeing, yet again, with the eyes of a child, this time from a different perspective, this time trained in .technical skill. Exquisitely hard work.
“Vive la différence” I say 🙂
Astoundingly beautiful! I want to be able to paint that too — and have it look as gorgeously sumptuous!
Paul,
You’re a far better person thsn I am! I would have gone right up to thst “teacher,” and asked her what exactly she MEANS by such a question!
Then I would proceed to tell her of my late great uncle who made a very comfortable living as a realist sculptor. (Btw ALL his work is in private collections. No family member has any of his work!) His sister, my late grandmother, was the main breadwinner of the family as a commercial artist, later in retirement working as a portrait artist. (My late grandfather was disabled from being wounded in WWI.)
I can honestly ask her, why would one have to CHOOSE?
BOTH approaches to art are legitimate ways of both seeing AND feeling!