If You Don’t Try, You Don’t Learn…
I love this painting, not only for the finished result, but for the thinking behind it.
This gentleman has worked with me for some time and his more familiar subjects are coastal and shipping scenes. So when he decided to paint a pheasant surveying the East Cornwall countryside, it was quite a departure… and deliberately so.
The reference photograph, taken by Alec Evans, made such an impression on him that rather than staying with subjects he already knew, he decided to challenge himself with something completely different.
As he put it so perfectly:
“If you don’t try, you don’t learn.”
That really sums up so much of what I believe about learning to draw and paint.
Learning Art Is About Learning to See
It can be very tempting, once we discover a subject or technique we feel comfortable with, to stay there. We know what to expect and we know roughly how to tackle it. But something very interesting happens when an artist moves beyond that familiar territory.
Suddenly we have to look again.
How is this particular shape constructed? Where is its weight? Which areas come forward and which disappear? What is actually happening to the colour as the light changes? How do we create the illusion of three dimensions on a completely flat canvas?
These are the questions that help us grow as artists.
Learning to draw and paint isn’t about repeatedly copying something you already know how to do. It is about understanding how to see… observing shape, proportion, colour, light, shadow, perspective and depth, then learning how to translate those observations into your own artwork.
One Painting… Several Different Challenges
Look at the wonderful weight and solidity he has achieved in the pheasant. There are subtle changes of colour throughout the feathers, highlights that help describe its form and carefully observed details that give the bird its character.
Then look beyond it.
The East Cornwall countryside required completely different handling. Instead of the stronger detail and contrast of the pheasant in the foreground, the landscape becomes softer as it recedes into the distance. Understanding that difference is part of creating convincing depth.
He told me that he is “always in the market for attempting something different, to take on a new challenge and to broaden my skill set.”
And that is exactly what happened here.
Developing Your Own Way of Painting
This principle runs through all my teaching, whether I am giving art lessons in Mawgan Porth and around Cornwall, working one-to-one with an artist, teaching live online or taking someone through my nine-hour Visual Awareness Art Masterclass.
I don’t want people to learn to copy my paintings or reproduce my particular technique.
I want them to understand the fundamentals of art well enough to make their own decisions.
Once you understand why light changes a form, why perspective creates depth, why colours behave differently beside one another and why our eyes interpret shapes in particular ways, you have knowledge that can travel with you from one subject to another.
A seascape in Mawgan Porth can teach you something that later helps with a pheasant in the East Cornwall countryside. A lesson about perspective can change the way you approach a harbour, a building, a landscape or even a figure.
That is when learning becomes transferable rather than simply learning how to reproduce one painting.
So Try the Thing You Haven’t Tried
If you always paint the sea, perhaps try a landscape. If you love landscapes, try a figure, an animal or a still life. Change your scale, change your subject or explore a different way of applying paint.
You don’t have to abandon the artwork you love creating. Exploring something unfamiliar can actually give you new understanding to bring back to it.
A rather magnificent pheasant… and an equally lovely example of what can happen when we are prepared to move beyond the familiar and have a go.
If you don’t try, you don’t learn.
Painting shared with the artist’s permission.
Reference photograph: Alec Evans.
