By chance, I discovered that one of my favorite painters, Bernard Dunstan, had written some of those 'how-to" Watson-Guptill books. Here's an excerpt from the book "Learning to Paint":
"It isn't until we start painting that we find out how little we have seen before...
The painter, perhaps, is almost the only person in our very specialized society who uses his eyes really objectively and without blinkers. He is able to accept without choice or preference all the visual stimuli that come to him.
This type of looking is one of the justifications for drawing and painting in a figurative way, however bad the results may be. At least the painter uses his eyes in a way that they can seldom be used in everyday life: at full stretch, accepting and examining a totality of experience. This visual experience can be an important extension of the human consciousness, one that requires a certain humility on the part of the artist--an absorption in the character and reality of the subject, rather than merely in the production of an acceptable end-product, the picture."
Today's painting is a 9x12 oil on panel that I did yesterday morning at Haley Farm at the end of Hopper Road in Williamstown, MA. It's a hot, steaming view of the Hopper.
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