A Landscape Painter’s Guide to Building Internal Compositions – Easel Talk #45
When I first started creating landscape paintings on the computer, back around 2005, 2006, I thought digital tools would solve everything. I had the undos, the infinite possibilities, the comfort of working without consequence. I’d been a commercial illustrator for 13 years, comfortable with digital workflows. So I figured: why not just paint a tree, a hill, a sky from my imagination?
What came out was laughable.
I was genuinely shocked. Here I was with over a decade of professional illustration work under my belt, capable of rendering animals and characters with technical precision, and I couldn’t compose a basic landscape from memory. The brushwork was interesting. The textures and colors showed promise. But the forms, the actual structure of the landscape itself, felt primitive. Crude. Like I’d never really seen what I was trying to paint.
Reference Isn’t Destination
I quickly switched to using reference. I photographed Campbell Perkins Ponds, beautiful spot, really luminous water and interesting tree groupings. I made paintings from those photographs, and immediately the work improved. But here’s where most painters get stuck: they start copying the photos instead of painting.
Reference isn’t meant to be a destination, it’s a channel for your imagination. You want reference to spark something, to give you material to work with, but you want your imagination to drive the show.
Over 15, 16 years now of painting, I’ve learned this: you don’t become a better painter by copying more accurately. You become a better painter by building an internal vocabulary so vast, so deeply embedded in your visual consciousness, that you can reference or ignore that reference depending on what the painting needs.
That’s what internal compositions really are. They’re the accumulated visual knowledge that lets you paint with authority, whether you’re working from a photograph, a sketch, or pure imagination.
George Inness and the Arc of Simplification
Look at George Inness if you want to see this principle at its most eloquent. He’s the great exemplar of this journey.
When Inness started out, he was essentially synthesizing two things: etchings by Claude Lorrain, the grandfather of landscape painting, and his own drawings made directly from nature. You can see the influence clearly in his early work. Those contrasty, harsh tree forms, those carefully articulated details, the hallmark of the Hudson River School painters. Lots of information. Lots of specificity.
But something happened around 1850 when Inness encountered the work of the Barbizon painters. His entire approach shifted. He started moving away from detail toward what I’d call archetypal painting, simpler, more expressive, more driven by feeling than documentation. He jettisoned the specificity in favor of something more universal.
This wasn’t a popular move. People gave him grief about it. They preferred the detailed, information-heavy approach he’d abandoned. But he kept going, kept refining, kept reducing.
By the late 1880s, near the end of his life, Inness was creating work that was almost abstract, deeply archetypal, impacted with color, incredibly imaginative, and often not based on any actual place that exists in the world. These paintings are my favorite of his work. They’re evocative, moving, almost transcendent. And they’re the direct result of a lifetime spent learning landscape painting so thoroughly that he no longer needed the reference.
That progression, from detailed reference-based work to simplified, expressive, imagination-driven work, that’s the arc every serious painter should be moving along.
Building the Internal Library
Here’s what I think was happening with Inness: he was accessing an enormous internal vocabulary of landscape forms filtered through a lifetime of observation and practice. How many trees had he painted? How many skies, clouds, water effects? Thousands. Tens of thousands. And that vast library became internalized. It became part of him.
The same thing has been happening to me over the last 15, 16 years. I haven’t painted as many paintings as Inness, I don’t think anyone in the modern era, working at reasonable pace, paints as much as those Victorian masters did, but I’ve built something. I’ve painted tree after tree after tree until, finally, I have my trees. Not generic trees. Not Claude Lorrain trees. My trees. They’re internal to me now. Same with clouds, water, roads, stone formations, horizon lines.
This is why I’m always telling people: you work all the time. That solves the majority of your problems. Yes, not everything you make will be great. Some paintings will be outright failures. Some will be embarrassing. But that’s the only way to build this internal vocabulary. There’s no shortcut. You can’t think your way to understanding how trees work, you have to paint them repeatedly until the knowledge moves from your conscious mind into your hands, your intuition, your visual memory.
You don’t need to become some kind of technical master first. You don’t need to learn every trick or develop perfect rendering skills. What you need is repetition. Volume. The accumulation of small, incremental insights.
Every painting teaches you something. You learn how a particular blue mixes with a particular green. You learn which brushstroke creates the illusion of distant foliage. You learn that horizon lines work better when they’re slightly off-center. You learn that some trees need hard edges and some need soft. You learn that a road doesn’t have to be photographically accurate to feel true.
These lessons compound. After a hundred paintings, you have a foundation. After five hundred, you have a library. After a thousand, you have something that approaches mastery, not in the sense of technical perfection, but in the sense of fluency. You can paint landscape like you speak your native language, fluidly and without constant conscious deliberation.
Reference in a Mature Practice
Even now, after all these years, I still use reference. I still photograph things. I still keep reference images nearby when I’m painting. But the relationship has fundamentally changed.
When you’re starting out, reference is a crutch. It’s necessary, but it’s also limiting. You become dependent on it. You copy instead of interpret.
When you’re developing, reference becomes a partner. It stimulates your imagination rather than replacing it. You use it as a jumping-off point, a source of details and inspiration, but you’re willing to change things, experiment, contradict it when the painting demands something different.
When you’re experienced, reference becomes almost invisible. It’s there. It might be something you glance at occasionally. But the real work is happening in your hands, in your accumulated experience, in that vast internal library that’s been built over years of repetition.
Dennis Sheehan, who I studied with at his academy in 2013, approaches this differently than I do. Dennis loved working without reference, he’d prep a white canvas with burnt sienna and phthalo green, then just rub and push the paint around, looking for archetypal forms to emerge. This is a legitimate approach, especially if you have a developed vocabulary. Dennis has been painting for decades. His internal library is enormous. He doesn’t need a photograph to spark his imagination.
But I found that method made my work too samey. Without some variation in reference, I was painting the same compositions over and over. So I developed my own approach: I use reference, but I actively juice it up, I change it, combine elements from different sources, push the colors further, adjust the composition. The reference isn’t a destination; it’s a departure point.
The key principle is the same, though: never copy the reference. At some point, halfway through, two-thirds through, definitely before the finish, you need to let the reference go and let the painting be what it wants to be. If copying reference is one of your problems, turn the image off. Actually turn it off. Hide it. Force yourself to paint from memory and imagination.
These days I don’t have to do that. I’ve failed enough, ruined enough paintings, learned enough harsh lessons, that I can have reference right there and simultaneously know: this is the reference, but this is the painting, and these are two different things. The painting will be what it’s going to be, and my job is to honor that rather than fight it.
The Timeline of Internal Development
If you’re just starting out, expect your internal compositions to be limited. Don’t be discouraged by this. Your vocabulary is small because you haven’t painted enough. The solution isn’t to feel bad about it, it’s to paint more.
In those early days, go ahead and make copies from photographs. I don’t say this pejoratively. Making copies is how you build foundational understanding. You’re learning how forms relate to each other, how values create dimension, how color temperature affects perception. Fine. Copy. Learn. Build.
But understand that this isn’t the destination. Copying doesn’t make great paintings. It makes competent studies. To make great paintings, you need to move beyond copying into interpretation and invention.
In the middle years, and this is where I’ve been for the last decade or so, you’re noticing patterns. You’re beginning to understand how certain elements work together. You’re starting to trust your instincts more than your reference. Your reference becomes less of a strict guide and more of a collaborator. You’ll paint 30 percent more green than you see, or adjust the horizon line by half an inch, or combine elements from three different photographs into one composition. You’re not copying. You’re composing.
In the later years, you’ll have access to a vast internal library. You’ll be able to create complex, evocative work based primarily on imagination and feeling, with reference serving only as a subtle influence or spark. Your work will likely become simpler, more abstract, more emotionally direct, like what happened with Inness in his final decades. Or maybe you’ll go the other direction. Maybe you’ll load in more detail, more specificity. There are many legitimate ways to express what you see and feel.
The point is: the more you paint, the more choices you have. The more freedom.
Paint Every Day
I can’t stress this enough: paint every day. Or as close to every day as your life allows. Make it non-negotiable. Make it the thing you do when you wake up and the thing you do before bed. Make it the thing you turn to when you’re frustrated or bored or stuck creatively.
This isn’t romantic. It’s not about inspiration or muses or waiting for the right mood. It’s about building the internal vocabulary through repetition and accumulated experience. It’s about training your eye and your hands to work together without conscious intervention.
Think about how you learned to read. At first, every letter was a conscious effort. You had to sound things out. You had to think about what each symbol meant. Now you read fluidly, without thinking. You can read an entire page and absorb complex meaning without your conscious mind doing much of anything. Your brain and eyes have been trained through repetition.
Painting is the same. At first, every brushstroke is deliberate. Every decision is conscious. You’re thinking about what you’re doing moment to moment. But over time, as you accumulate thousands of repetitions, the process becomes intuitive. You develop what musicians call “muscle memory” and artists call “hand knowledge.” Your hands start to know things your mind doesn’t have to explain.
That’s what separates a painter who’s been working for a few months from one who’s been working for fifteen years. Not talent. Not some mysterious gift. Repetition. Accumulated experience. The willingness to fail publicly and often, then keep going.
Synthetic Painting
What I’m describing is what I call synthetic painting, the synthesis of reference and imagination, observation and invention, technical skill and emotional truth. You’re taking all these disparate elements, the photograph, the memory, the feeling, the accumulated vocabulary, and weaving them into something unified and new.
This is the work. This is what painting actually is.
You’re not trying to become a better photographer. You’re not trying to render reality with photographic accuracy. Photographs already exist. You’re trying to create something that didn’t exist before, something that has the weight of observed reality but the resonance of felt truth. Something that can only be made through the combination of your eye, your experience, your hand, and your imagination.
The best paintings always come from this synthesis. They always balance reference with invention, technical skill with emotional directness, specificity with universality. And the only way to develop the ability to strike that balance is through years of practice, thousands of paintings, willingness to fail, and the discipline to keep showing up.
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