I
may have grabbed your attention at the risk of making you think I'm a big fat
fibber, but I do think that when it comes to landscape painting, you sometimes
have to lie--or at least exaggerate--to get what you want. This is based on personal
experience--maybe I'm unlucky, but I do not
step into a landscape of wonder and majesty every time I go outside. Finding a
place worthy of being documented in a landscape oil painting doesn't happen to
me regularly.
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Rocky Landscape by Hercules Seghers, 1600s, oil painting.
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Instead,
when I walk out of the house, usually I'm struck by how
ordinary everything is. But that doesn't mean
painting landscapes is an
endeavor that should grind to screeching halt. Artists just need to learn the
rule of pushing it.
Suppose
you've settled on a subject for your next landscape oil painting, but no
unicorn has trotted in to make an otherwise normal scene truly exceptional. If you
are second guessing yourself about what you've chosen to paint and are considering
something drastic like starting over, don't! Instead, you have to start to push
it--and everything is fair game. From the angles of a cluster of trees, to the
colors in the sky, to the patterns made by the wind in a grassy field,
everything can be enhanced or firmed up to give you a stronger composition than
what you started with.
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Landscape by Camille Corot, 1800s, oil painting.
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I
don't know if this strikes some committed landscape artists as insincere or
wrong, but it works for me, mostly because I don't believe your subject should
have ownership over you as an artist. You get to make the decisions, and that
means changing, moving, and
pushing
things to get your message across--and that is the most important aspect of painting
landscapes, cityscapes, people, still lifes, or anything else.
For
more landscape painting techniques, check out landscape ebook title TK. It is a
solid resource for artists interested in firming up their technical abilities, and
it just might give us all the inspirational nudge we need to get out there and
paint what we see in front of us--as well as what we want to see in front of us. Enjoy!
