You Cannot Paint a Tree, So Stop Trying

I started painting landscapes by painting from photos.  I don't think that is the ideal way to learn.  Unfortunately, most people work during the day and take classes at night, when plein air landscape is hard, to say the least.  And believe me, painting from photographs is better than not painting at all!  But learning to paint landscapes from photos has a lot of drawbacks.  First of all, except for professional photographers and a few really avid amatuers, most of us take really lousy photos.  The light is wrong, the sky is too washed out and the shadows are too dark.  The color is also wrong; understandable when you consider the limitations of commercial ink.  And although commercial printers are sooooo much better than they used to be, they are still limited----drastically so when compared to the infinite range of color and hue and light in nature.  Experienced artists can learn to deal with these limitations.  But for beginners, this creates serious problems.

One of the biggest skills one must learn in painting is to see (really see) what is in front of him.  Most beginners will tell you that the California hills are brown in summer.  They are not.  They are yellow and orange and violet and olive and mauve.  But the beginner's eyes haven't yet learned the subtle translation of vibrant color combinations that truly make up what we see.  And film does not capture it.  So new students will pull out a tube of raw umber (probably the ugliest color that ever saw the inside of a tube), mix it with white and call it a dry, grassy hill.  Deep shadows will end up black; sea foam, white.  They can't help it.  And so they work hard to try to mix the exact color of the leaves on the tree, but in the end, it's not nature's tree....it's Kodak's tree.  And speaking of trees, a crisp photo captures every leaf, millions of them, in fact, and makes students want to paint every one of them.  Do not go there, or you will be painting leaves for the rest of your life. 

The fact is, you cannot paint a tree.  I cannot paint a tree.  A tree is not made of paint.  But we can paint an image, an impression, or a representation of a tree.  We can paint a painting of a tree.  Better yet, we can paint OUR painting of the tree.  And to really do that, we have to "see" it with all our senses.  Up close, and personal.  Plein air...from real life....