Speaking of Art Blog

Painting reflections in water can be tricky. If the water is moving slightly, the long vertical shapes can be fun to paint with their squiggly ends, but what about if the water is perfectly still? One would think that creating still water reflections would be easier than moving water reflections, but that’s when it gets especially tricky. Everything has to line up exactly or it looks out of whack. But the hardest part I’ve found about rendering still water reflections are the diagonal strokes. My brain wants to go in the wrong direction with my lines.

I recently finished painting this pastel piece, Lily Lake, CO. While the mountain and tree reflections were hard enough (I used a ruler frequently to line things up), the real troublesome part were those clouds in the lower left corner. I first created the top half of my painting, the part above water, and I didn’t always stick religiously to my reference photo. So when the time came to render the water reflections, I could no longer use my reference photo. Instead I had to paint the mirror image of what I had painted in the top half. The clouds were where I really got lost.

I tried tipping my head sideways as I worked, and that offered some success, but it was limited. What I quickly realized was that my brain was reading:  clouds. But what I needed to do was not think of them as familiar objects, just shapes, colors, and directional lines. 

Some artists find turning their canvas or board upside down to help when they encounter such a situation as this. But my problem was that even if I turned my piece upside down I was still seeing the same scene and my brain was still seeing familiar objects, only the upside down set of them.

So I turned my board and paper 90 degrees. Ahha, now I had a Rorschach inkblot-like image in front of me. Now the familiar objects weren’t familiar anymore. That solved my problem. Now I could render the mirror image of what I saw on the right because the shapes held no meaning for me. Problem solved.

Many times in creating artwork the artist has to set aside their preconceived notions of what their brain tells them about a familiar object. When they approach their subject they need to pay more attention to shape, line, color, and value (shading) than to anything they’ve known previously about that object. It’s a different way of looking, of seeing, what’s in front of them. And sometimes they need to come up with a way to trick their brain into NOT seeing the familiar. “Is that a cloud? Nope, it’s just a Rorschach inkblot. Oh, now I see.”