ANNOUNCEMENT:

• I am delighted with the response to my new book, The Art of Notan: An Artist's Guide for Painting Lights & Shadows.  You can see the Table of Contents and the first 19 pages by clicking on the "Read Sample" button underneath the cover's photo at Amazon. 

• Would you like to discover how painting on an overcast day can be as exciting as in sunlight?  Check out our April 23 workshop!  

Whether painting is a hobby, a mode of therapy, or an artistic drive, it is visual communication.  Every form of communication happens through some sort of mode.  For painters that mode is the substance of imagery, whether objective, subjective, or somewhere in-between.  

The best communicators learn the craft of their mode, then through experience using the craft, find their unique method of expression.  The more experience one has with this process, the better communicator one becomes.  

Andrew Wyeth found his imagery within the lives of his neighbors and family. Claude Monet found his imagery within the perception of how light effects color. Helen Frankenthaler found her imagery through experimenting with materials.  

THE ONE THING TO WATCH FOR

Master painters learn to avoid what I call "the image trap." It the one thing that can trip us up when we're emerging as painters and can stymie our visual communication. To illustrate that term of mine, let's use the comparison of these two birds.

Photos from Pixabay.com

See how shadow in which the bird on the left is located causes us to see his white feathers as dark to middle value?    

See how the directional changes of each bird's edges indicate their gestures? 

See how shadow softens textures whereas light reveals them on both birds?

We fall into the "image trap" when our focus of attention is on the image itself rather than what makes it appear the way it does.  Believe it or not, that substance is made of our visual elements: shape, value, color, texture, direction, line and size.  They are our mode of visual communication!

Light and Shadow: The one thing that lets our eyes see.
Visual Movement: What our eyes do when images are visible.
Seeing Beyond the Image: The possibilities beyond just describing what our eyes see.
Freeing the Artist Within (Curiosity): Finding our individual interpretation to what our eyes are seeing. 
Composing:  Finding ways to put together all that we discover.
Drawing:  Searching the potential of images.
The Craft:  Continually forging our skills to visually communicate what we continue to discover with our eyes, mind and soul.

And the eighth:

The Art:  The results when all the above are working together.