"Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky." - Khalil
Gibran Perhaps the biggest challenge for those of us who paint
from life is to see and understand what is right before our
eyes. This may sound simple, but it is anything but, and it
takes unrelenting practice to get good at it. Why this is so has
partly to do with the way our brains are wired, partly to do
with our visual biases, and partly to do with the sheer
complexity of the world. Learning to see the world in terms of
paint requires the unlearning of some visual habits and the
acquisition of some new skills of |This is an example of a
mature Hickory tree. Can you see how it has a cascading growth
habit, like a Spirea shrub? In this graphic diagram, we have
reduced the many small changes in value to four only, and have
also consolidated the many small shapes into larger masses. This
has its unique shape and made it more paintable. It is important
and useful to learn to see masses and shape and to reduce the
hundreds of smaller shapes into a f