Woolly’s Bay Afternoon 5×7: 15 Min Painting Session!
Welcome to another tonalist landscape oil painting demonstration. This is Woolies Bay Afternoon, a five by seven I painted last week. I want to talk about why I painted it and what it shows about how painting actually works.
The Postcard
I’ve been thinking about making a small postcard featuring a coastal scene for a long time. This is Woolies Bay. I painted this same scene before as a panoramic five by ten, and that version turned out well. This one at five by seven comes from the same reference, but it’s a different painting.
You might assume that revisiting the same reference would be pointless. Why paint the same thing again? But that’s a misunderstanding of what reference actually does.
Reference Isn’t Everything
The reference is extremely important, but people give it too much emphasis.
With the exact same reference, one day you can make a great painting and the next day you could fail. Not because the reference changed. Because you changed. Your consciousness is different. Maybe one day you were seeing clearly, making lucid decisions. The next day you weren’t.
Painting is all about making decisions. Thousands and thousands of decisions in every single painting. The big ones first—what size, what proportions, what approach to color. But then every color mixture is a decision. Every brushstroke is a decision. Every modification of every brushstroke is a decision.
Don’t try to track all of this consciously. You’ll be overwhelmed.
Even starting out, you’re making most of these decisions automatically. A lot of your automatic decisions are going to be your undoing. You need to know when to dial into the process, pay attention, be strategic. And you need to know when to let the soul-conscious part of you drive.
The soul-conscious part fails less frequently than the rational mind. The rational mind gets all the credit, but it’s not where the best work comes from.
What I Was Working On
In this painting, one thing was on my mind: I have a tendency to let cloud forms become rows and layers. This comes from nature itself—clouds do form in layers. But when you’re interpreting a reference onto the canvas, the abstraction involved can make the row thing take on its own identity. It becomes a pattern that was never apparent in the reference. That’s a problem I’ve noticed, and I’m always trying to improve it.
There are plenty of other challenges in every painting. But what I think about on a daily basis is that I need to get in there and make a painting. Because the more you paint, the better you get. No other way around it.
Working Matters
This week I wanted to paint because I didn’t feel like I’d done quite enough paintings. Nobody’s measuring my output except me. And honestly, I don’t care much about what happened last month or two months ago. I’m interested in what’s going on in the recent past and what’s going to happen in the near future.
Sometimes they’re going to be well regarded. Sometimes they’re awesome. Sometimes less so. But here’s what happens when you show up and do the work on a regular basis: the bad ones are less bad, and the overall quality is far greater.
You’ll still occasionally do something extremely excellent. I don’t get too hung up about that because I understand that everything has to align for a painting to be successful. You need the right mental outlook. You need to decide to paint that day. You need time dedicated to actually finish paintings. And then you need to deal with the fact that you sacrificed your time and effort, but not all the paintings measure up.
The Speed Problem
This is not naturally human. We’ve forgotten what we used to know: that good things take a while. Developing the skills to create something beautiful and masterful takes time. But technology has changed expectations. Now so many things can be accomplished very rapidly with quality that’s good enough or better than average.
You could just go to an AI, type in “a beautiful tonalist landscape in the style of Michael Francis McCarthy,” and get a painting. It’s not real painting. It’s not made in the real world. You didn’t do much except type a prompt.
Some people find that satisfying. They put their name on it. We think of them as fools because we’re painters. We know it’s involved. We know that to make something even mediocre requires quite a lot of effort. And it’s time and effort well spent. That’s the difference between making something and typing a prompt.
Honest Assessment
When I look at my older work, I feel a sense of pride sometimes. Other times I see things I could have done better. Be honest with yourself about the level of your work. Where you were, where you are now, where you’re going. It matters.
You’re going to reach a point where you should be getting better but you seem to be going backward. You look at things you’ve done in the past that you thought were better, and you think maybe they should be automatically better now. There are a lot of reasons for that. I’ve run into it.
Here’s what I say about that: just make another painting.
Every day is a new day. Every painting is a new chance to express yourself. That’s the name of the game. Expressing yourself with some mastery. Making something that is beautiful. That’s worthwhile.
It’s not easy to do. I’m not the channel that tells you it’s easy. But it’s not the most impossible thing either. You don’t have to be a genius. All you really have to do is show up on the regular and do it.
The more you temper—meaning the more you second-guess, hesitate, wait for the perfect conditions—the less you paint. Prime the pump. Paint. That’s what matters.
Stay out of trouble. And fight the power.
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