"Paint what you see"

I've been thinking about this lately, the first thing your art teacher tells you. It's trite but it''s still pretty good advice when you think about it. As I've been pondering it lately, it seems like there's two levels to it, and it is a good model for a person's growth as an artist.

"Paint what you see"

The first meaning is to look - really look - and paint it. The book Drawing on the Right side of the Brain, for all its outdated "left brain/right brain" theory, has a good representation of how children approach drawing - for the most part, they rely heavily on symbol drawing, where everything is drawn as a representation of an eye, a door, a cat, a bicycle. It's also why people have such a hard time with perspective - they can't get the image in their head to rotate just right to fit.

This is why a person's first challenge in drawing or painting is to observe their subject, depicting what their eye tells them is there instead of what their brain tells them. I always feel like my eye and brain are having a fight at figure drawing class ("What are you doing? That isn't what an arm looks like!" "That's what this arm looks like!") as I try to discern what's really there as opposed to what I think is there.

"Paint what you see"

The second level is getting over the idea that there is only one way to make a painting and for you to put our own unique stamp on something. I really struggled with (and still do) the idea that if it's not photorealistic, it's not "right." The current resurgence in classical painting is awesome in many ways, but it makes me a little bit sad when it holds to the idea that art has to be on par with a photograph to be good. Don't get me wrong - I love a lot of that stuff, but much of it also leaves me cold as it comes off as technical excellence at the cost of a sense of vibrancy. Besides that, not everyone had the aptitude or interest to paint that way. The key is to observe, then to show us your unique interpretation.