This year has been an incredible year for me. We moved from Connecticut to Virginia, I became a full time artist, and I began teaching oil and acrylic painting to students in Charlottesville, VA and Orange, VA. The experience I have brought has been amassed over a lifetime since I have been painting and/or drawing since I was very small, and have been heavily influenced by my artist father, Francis W. Vogel. My father instilled in me a sense of wonder for looking at the world, always looking at things with a keen eye for observation. My father taught me how to really SEE, which is an incredible gift. 

Most of us wander through our day, often scurrying to get from one activity to the next, without actually being present. Learning how to be an artist, and how to paint and draw, has taught me to take in what I see, not just gloss over it. For you cannot accurately paint or draw something, until you understand what it actually looks like. Most of us have general shapes and ideas of what things look like, but are not very good at being able to KNOW what some thing looks like. That is why "eyewitness testimonies" are extremely unreliable; most of us aren't really paying attention to life all that much and can't accurately describe something in detail.

Which leads me to teaching art and keeping it simple, today's topic. In order to paint, or draw, or sculpt, or create, you have to have an image from which to draw from. And if your memory files are blurry, indistinct, too general, then you will not be able to create what you want effectively. You see our brains have a way of creating "zip files" that have the details removed, and are just a broad brush overview of something so that when we see it, we can recognize it. But if we had to sit down and actually draw the object, could we?

When we are creating something, we are often not creating, but RE-creating something. And in the process of re-creating it, we have to be able to convey it effectively. This requires being able to KNOW what it looks like, intimately. We have to know its proportions, its shape, its form, its color, its reflective and textural qualities. And in order to know this, we have to OBSERVE it. We have to really study it, understand its lines, and how it's put together. 

So when you find yourself getting ready to draw, paint, sculpt, or otherwise RE-create something, you must get down on it's level and really LOOK at it. And ask yourself this question "If I were to draw this, how would I do that? What shape is this thing over all? What shape is that part of it that I'm looking at? How do these parts come together? What are the proportions of the parts as they relate to each other? How would I convey this three dimensional object in a two dimensional way? What shape is the negative shape that exists in between and around the parts? What angle am I seeing this from? What is my perspective?"

To illustrate this, I sketched my dark marble salt shaker to see how well I could capture it's contours and covey the fact that it's a dark reflective surface. With paint, I find it much easier to convey that information because I can switch colors. When sketching, however, your only tools are tonal values; light and dark with the tones in between. This exercise also emphasized the distortion that a single monocular lens (camera) imparts on an image when compared with our binocular lens from our human eyes. Plus our mind and brain will focus in on what we want to see, and blur out the rest. The camera tries to focus on everything all at once, which is not how we see. The camera will also distort the angles. The top of the salt shaker was roughly the same diameter as the top, In the photo, the top appears much larger than the base, which is very distorted. When sketching or drawing, we can study the object in real life, and draw it correctly, instead of replicating the errors in a photo.

In the example below, I can also see that my right and left sides are not symmetrical, which means that I am dominant on one side over the other in my brain. Correcting the left and right side is a simple exercise and can be done easily but checking the line shapes on each side and correcting where they are different can only be done when you check them first. I left them uncorrected here so you could see it clearly.

When you are learning to draw, paint, sculpt or to create, start with simple shapes and objects you find in your home and practice LOOKING at them and really SEEING how they ARE rather than allowing the left brain to fill it in as it THINKS it is. I can't think of a better exercise than doing this. These are the foundations that help you to create a good quality piece of art: the ability to SEE. When you can train your eyes, brain, mind, and hands to work together in a coordinated effort, then you can begin to really create, because you will have experience RE-CREATING. So you will know when something is off, you will know why, and you will be able to correct it.

To create is to give yourself permission to make mistakes. To be an artist means knowing which mistakes to keep!

Keep practicing, and keep it simple so that you fall in love with the process and so that you will progress noticeably! Move on to more complicated things only when you can reliably draw, paint, or sculpt simple objects first. This is your kindergarten creative class. When you are satisfied with how you paint, draw, or sculpt simple things, make the goals a little harder to achieve, and you will keep going because you will see success!

Stay PRESENT, LOOK, SEE, and KEEP GOING! You're making progress and will notice when you look back on things you did six months ago, and if you practice ever day, the progress will happen more rapidly!

Until my next blog, God bless and enjoy the creative process!