A Landscape Painter’s Guide to Making a Good Start – Easel Talk #59
Transcript and Key Insights
Creating successful paintings begins before the first brushstroke. Over my 15 years of nearly daily painting, I’ve developed a consistent approach that helps me get started effectively. The principles of making a good start remain consistent, regardless of the many other factors involved with painting.
The Mental Approach to Starting
Don’t mythologize painting. Treat it as something you just do, like brushing your teeth or tying your shoes. Yes, it’s a special activity, but don’t over-mythologize it. That doesn’t help you build a working approach.
Adopt a mindset of play. This is absolutely critical. I’m not an experimental painter, but I give full rein to impulses that occur to me as I paint. If something comes to me—let’s make this orange, let’s make this dark, let’s make it brighter—I tend to indulge it. The underpainting is the perfect place to try things out. If it doesn’t work, I wipe it off and do something completely different. That’s okay.
Establish a regular practice. This talk is targeted to people who want to create a lot of paintings, who look at paintings and think, “That’s what I want to do.” It’s a challenge, but there are things you can do to set yourself up for success. Having a regular painting practice is pretty much number one.
Setting Up Your Daily Practice
If you’re a working person, here’s what I recommend: Come home, have your dinner, do the dishes, then walk over to your painting area and make a painting for an hour. You can have the radio on, audiobooks in the background—audiobooks are great because you get through a lot of books as you paint. But when you sit down, you’re making paintings, not scrolling on your phone.
Create a dedicated space. Even if you rent a room, dedicate one corner to painting. Set up your table or easel with your paints there. You can work in an extremely condensed manner if you need to—a pushade box, some boards, some paint, some brushes. That’s all you need.
The key is this: when you sit in that spot, you only do painting-related work. You’re not messing around doing other stuff. What happens is that spot will take on an almost magical ability to transform your life. When I come to this studio, I don’t mess around doing other things. Anything I do here is painting related. If you’ve got a kitchen table with four chairs and your family is three people, well, the fourth chair is your painting area. Don’t worry about oil and food—you’re not going to get poisoned because somebody had a tube of cad yellow on the end of the table.
Eliminating Barriers
Procrastination is a barrier. Not having a setup ready to go when you have time to paint is a barrier. Not having things to paint is another barrier. You want to eliminate these.
Have prepared boards and canvases ready. Don’t paint on canvas if you like painting on canvas, but make sure they’re prepped and ready. You can just put it on the easel and start working. If you’re too tired on a given night, do board prep instead of scrolling your phone. Once you have hundreds of boards prepped, you’ll start thinking, “I really ought to paint some of those.”
Keep your materials ready: quality brushes cleaned and ready, quality paints, everything in place so you’re removing excuses. Many times you might think, “I want to make a painting,” only to follow through with, “I don’t know what to paint. I don’t have nothing to paint on.” Get ahead of that.
Collecting Inspiration
If you’re a painter, you’re always seeing things that might make good paintings. Don’t think you’re going to remember it. Start collecting these things.
Take pictures of things in the real world that catch your eye. If it’s a master’s painting you think you could learn from, save that. Don’t think you’re going to find it later. Inspiration is so important. When it’s time for you to paint, it’s not the time to be wondering what to paint. You need a whole big folder of images ready to go. This way, you’re not searching for things to paint when you should be painting—you’ve got reference ready before you ever sit down.
The Underpainting: Your Foundation
The foundation of your painting is the underpainting. This is a big part of making a strong and good start because it supports you throughout the entire painting process.
With the underpainting, you can get as involved or as sloppy as you like. The whole idea is to help set up the framework—the armature of the painting, like an armature for a statue. This is a place to try out different compositional ideas and see how things actually work on the surface of the board.
The reference as it stands is going to get changed. There’s almost never a time when I make a painting and it looks exactly like the reference. You’ve got to break that reference down internally, and the best way to do that is with an underpainting.
I prefer the underpainting approach, maybe because of my years as a drawer. I see underpainting as a drawing process. What is drawing in its core essence? It’s measuring. This tree is that big. That hill is that big. The path is this big. The sky is yea big. That’s drawing.
Letting the Painting Develop
Invariably, as I’m painting along with my reference right there, things get much different on the board than on the reference. When you’re inexperienced, you might panic—”I’ve got no moorings, I’m floating out in the abyss.” That’s true, but it doesn’t mean you should pound your painting into conformity with the reference.
It’s probably better to let it express itself in the moment. Yes, you might end up with a bad painting. That could happen. That’s a risk you have to run. You can’t get proficient without failing. That’s just how it is.
But here’s what matters: you are the creator and the painting wouldn’t exist without your creative impetus. Once you start painting, you’re involved in a sequence of actions and interactions that lead to the finished work. You have significant input, but things will also go in odd directions. That’s the way it is.
A large part of being a successful landscape painter is allowing this process to happen. Let the painting be the painting. Be the painter creating the painting, and let the painting be the painting.
The Cost of Mastery
What is the price you must pay to become a master?
First: time. You cannot become masterful by applying yourself randomly and sporadically. If you want to be a painter, you’ve got to make paintings.
Second: doing bad paintings. This is the cost of becoming a master, and there are no exceptions. You must do them. Do them, throw them away. This builds up your muscles and your mind. It builds your ability to perceive things.
As you work through your body of work, you’ll remember: oh, I tried that and it failed. I tried that before and it doesn’t work. Maybe I’ll try this—oh, that works. So next time you know a way that works and you won’t fail in that regard.
There are so many different aspects and components to every painting that it’s going to take a while to work your way through all these potential ways to fail. But you must do it. There’s no workaround.
If you make three paintings a year, you’re not going to garner enough experience to be amazing. But if you did a painting a day, after 365 paintings, you’re going to be way better than you were at painting number one. Most of us won’t manage that every year, but it’s a worthy goal.
Supporting Your Process
Supporting yourself as an artist means you have an area dedicated in your home for painting. You have boards prepped. You have reference selected. You have decided that you will spend at least an hour every day painting.
The way you start sets the tone for the entire painting process. Taking time to establish good habits so that you’ll make a good start will pay dividends in your finished work.
This is the real thing: having the wrong mental outlook will constrict your original creative impetus, which is gold. Your desire to create and make things—if you give it your attention and time—will give your life a lot more meaning.
The path to mastery is having an attitude of play and expression. The best way to accomplish this is to paint every day and create many paintings. Some will be good, some will be okay, and many will be terrible. This is the path to mastery. This is the cost of being a master. This is the price you must pay.
Take good care of yourself. Stay out of trouble. And fight the power.
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