This evening I learnt a valuable lesson from my oil painting teacher.
This month the still life set up was a pitcher with flowers (pink and yellow forget-me-nots), a metal tin and some vases. He helped me choose a focus on flowers with a partial view of the rusty metal tin.
By the second lesson, my painting in progress was the one on the left. Today, after the third lesson, my painting was the one on the right. Though I think it was visibly more detailed after the class, the painting didn't seem to feel better for me, in fact the feel of it diminished for some reason. I preferred what it felt like at the second lesson, the painting on the left.
My teacher and I stood to look at it for a while, and he told me that when he painted flowers, he would have a few intentions in mind. He would paint the flowers to be spirited/lively, more colourful than the real blossom, and give the impression that it was blooming. Sounds logical? Guess it's easier said than done. And what had I done to my painting?
He said that I was quite skilled to get so much detail into the painting, but I had drawn too many stalks in detail and that had taken the focus off the flowers. I realised that I had painted a thing, and not flowers. My teacher had looked beyond the object, and added what the object embodied, and lent a quality to it. Flowers to him represent blossoming and life and should have that quality in the drawing - blurred strokes, colour, expansion beyond the canvas. Impression of petals, singular blossoms and implied blossoms. Interplay that with detail and colour of the other objects in the painting, and you get an automatic stage for the flowers.
It was a wonderful moment to understand that through my own experience. When I paint something, say flowers, after I establish the proportions, I can focus just on one part of the flower, one stalk, one petal, one part at a time, and then the next, and zoom out to see how it fits into the entire picture. I paint as realistically as I can, cos for some reason, I think that is the objective of still life. Well, I don't think painting realistically is wrong, just as I don't consider abstraction to be wrong either. But oh how wonderful to have a mindset changed! For me, this will affect all my paintings from now because now I have another path open to me!
My teacher shared with me his personal perspective. He did not say my work was poor, and I am not beating myself up for it either. I paint efficiently. I paint to take my mind off words. I paint to connect my eyes to colour, my eyes to my brush, my eyes to shapes and lines without calling them names, without painting stereotypes or preconceived ideas. I paint to free myself from old rules I gave myself along the way when I was learning how to paint. And today I broke another rule. Thank you, Mr Wee!
