DON'T MISS OUT ON OUR HALF PRICE SALES DURING DECEMBER!  This deal ends New Year's Eve, but the lessons and courses keep on giving!

The first seven unfolded in this order: 

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.

If you Google the definition of art, you will discover an array of pompous-sounding words, mostly full of conjecture, each claiming authority, but none of them inclusive. Any attempt to define art is never whole.  However, curiosity keeps our minds searching.  

AI generated Selline Sellineby 

Perhaps it is the art in painting that makes it seem mysterious to a lot of people.  But what if rather than attempting to define art, we look beyond academic definitions and search for what happens to cause art. Aren't we talking about the endless ways ideas and discoveries are uniquely expressed by human beings?

LEARNING THE ART

Any individual's unique search can hone the skills that produce art! The only thing that can prevent that from happening is when we judge ourselves to be insufficient.  That judgment can camouflage our ability to trust our true potential with fear of being less than.  But that is a false judgment, no matter where it comes from.  

Illustration by Satyress

A quote I love from Edwin Elliot is “By being yourself, you put something wonderful in the world that was not there before.” One thing we find in common among master artists and musicians (past and present) is their dogged reliance on their own unique voices rather than any attempt to emulate others.  

It's easy to get caught up in the false need to fit in with the way other artists are painting, or to allow our work to be influenced by the local art group, but the only thing you'll find by yielding to that, in the long run, is emptiness.  The real fulfillment is when we are following our inner voices, and the payoff there is this:  art can come from nowhere else.

Illustration by KP Yamu Jayanath

When we reconsider our first seven "mysteries", we appreciate that art happens when all of these are working together in concert.   The only mystery is that the process is never-ending, continually unfolding.  The more we discover, the more we find to be discovered.  And with every painting we create, we reinforce the timelessness of the artistic process.

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.