Often, when I go out to paint, I’m not sure where to go. I know the nature in my area quite well, and there is the thought of maybe travelling further. But then again, I know that within a few hundreds of kilometers, the subjects won’t be so dramatically different. So I pick a place, often nearby, making an educated guess, and then go there. While I’m walking around, I notice how much it actually matters to see the place in this new moment. It’s not something I can predict at home, though apparently I try, every time.
Then comes the moment of choosing the actual scene or subject to paint. Often, I come across a few spots I think could be candidates… but I doubt, or I think I could find something better. But, it’s a bit of a question, what does this actually mean? There seems to be an illusion of the perfect spot to paint.Then, once I’ve actually settled somewhere, I choose a subject, a composition, and set up my gear. Before I start painting, I drink some coffee, take a moment, and look around again, to notice that I am surrounded by multiple potential paintings. The question is whether I’d be able to paint them in a way that does them justice. Like today I saw a tree that had been broken off, and it would be a challenge. But I have noticed that subjects that seem challenging could turn out very well actually. So, anyway, there’s the thing that pausing at a place reveals more subjects that I don’t notice while walking. This seems to emerge only after a pause. A shift to stillness seems critical, like an inner aperture widening. What felt mundane at first suddenly becomes compelling.
In short, I went out to paint, not sure if I’d find a scene that would speak to me, only to find more than I could paint that day. And, then later I forget and might go through the same cycle again.
Every day is different, and also locally, things that are known to me, present themselves all so subtly different. You realize this, yet you need to live this repeatedly. Connected to this, and just as real; you scroll and see beautiful paintings of places far away, on the other side of the planet, and it makes you feel limited by the local landscape. Curiously, it’s a puzzle that you need to keep figuring out. It feels like adventure vs attention. But perhaps they are the same. Attention could be a form of adventure. I’m slowly learning to see this.
It also makes me wonder how a person, let’s say living and painting in Australia will look at paintings made here in the Netherlands.
