You Can’t Paint What You See, and Here’s Why

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One of the most common myths surrounding art is that anyone can learn how to paint what they see.

Do you know anyone who has learned this skill? What sort of training did they go through? How long did they spend “learning” it? How many hours of the day do they work on it? Have they mastered this skill?

I’m willing to bet no, no, no and no.

Now, imagine that you were standing in front of a mountain. Imagine that you had all day to draw this mountain. Now imagine that you only had one hour to draw this mountain and if you didn’t get it right in that hour, you would be executed at sundown. You would have to draw not just the details, but the essence of what the mountain means.

You wouldn’t be able to draw what you saw. You would have to draw what you felt about what you saw. You would have to capture something about it that wasn’t purely visual in nature.

The myth is that any schmuck can learn how to reproduce exactly what he sees on a canvas or a piece of paper and make it look like a photograph. The truth is far more complex than that…

You can’t paint what you see. You can’t paint what you feel. You can’t paint what you think. You can only paint what you imagine. You must create a world and invite the viewer into it.

Van Gogh was said to be crazy because he painted sunflowers and not the actual scene in front of him, preferring instead to imagine the scene that existed inside his head. His art was almost certainly not the product of a mental illness but the way he had been taught to see things as an artist: rather than seeing the actual world around him, he used his imagination to create paintings that brought out emotions and feelings about the subjects he painted.

This isn’t as radical a concept as it sounds. Although we often think of artists as people who just make things up, more often they’re people who are able to see things in different ways than everyone else sees them. Artists don’t create their own worlds from whole cloth; they take things from this one and rearrange them in their heads until they have an image that elicits a different reaction than the original thing did. The feelings we have about those images are then communicated down to us through our eyes and fingers, resulting in a work of art.*

The most famous art school in the world, The Royal Academy of Arts in London, has a problem. They don’t have enough applicants to fill their available slots and are looking to recruit more people for a program that costs about $1500 USD for a 1 semester course. The catch? You have to be able to draw–and paint–from life, not from photographs or from your imagination.

But why would anyone pay 1500 pounds (about $2000 USD) to go to an art school if they can’t paint from photos or their imaginations?

The reason is simple: you can’t paint what you see.

You can look at a still life, or the human figure, and think you’re painting it. You can look at the horizon line and think you’re drawing it. But you’re wrong. You’re seeing it as a photograph, a two-dimensional image of something that is three-dimensional.

Pictures tell us that there is no depth in the world around us; we know this from experience. We know that when we look at something we are seeing everything in front of us on the same plane, but we also know that this isn’t true from experience (we know this because we bump into things). When we paint something and try

Hi everyone, I’m John! I am a professional artist with an art degree and 10 years experience in the field. Over the past few years, I have been frustrated by the lack of information available to artists about how to improve their artwork. The information out there is either incomplete, outdated, or just plain wrong. This blog is my attempt to fill that gap; a collection of my thoughts on how to be a better artist and what it takes to make it in today’s art world.

I don’t like art much. I have always been a person that has to understand something before I can enjoy it, and art is not supposed to make sense.

I’ve seen artists that claim they just look at a blank canvas and start painting, or they say they just listen to their feelings and let themselves go free. This is only because they are self-taught, and have never learned the rules of art.

Art is not just whatever you want it to be. There are some things that you can’t paint no matter how hard you try. If you want to be an artist, then you need to learn some basic information about the subject first.

Artistic talent is innate, but artistic knowledge isn’t. You can’t just get up and paint. But if you really want to be an artist and make good paintings, then you will have to learn about how it works first.

How do you paint what you see?

How do you capture that beautiful scene in front of you? Is it as easy as pointing your camera? No, of course not. The problem is that we can’t actually see everything. We can only see a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum (the light visible to humans). And we can’t hear anything other than the tiny range of sound waves that happen to fall between 20 and 20,000 cycles per second.

What we are seeing, hearing, and experiencing is only a very small part of reality. A better question is how do you create or capture that image or moment that is in your head? How do you paint, draw, sketch, or sculpt what you experience in your mind’s eye?

Artists are obsessed with “realism”—the idea that their paintings, drawings, and sculptures should look exactly like something they saw when they looked at it. In short, artists think that art should reproduce reality. They’re not alone in this belief. We all believe it. You probably believe it too—even if you’ve never picked up a paintbrush or sculpting tool in your life.

Despite the fact that realism is a myth, many artists focus obsessively on reproducing reality because they don’t know what else to do. They don’t understand that looking at something doesn’t automatically mean you can copy it. But realism is only one of many artistic styles.

What if there’s another way to think about art? What if we could forget realism altogether? What if we could focus instead on expressing our own personalities and emotions through art?”

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