Cognitive painting & Camilla
In cognitive therapy, you challenge your original thoughts so that you can think in a more healthy way. I think of it as talking yourself out of something you believe in that is bringing you down. I am hereby defining cognitive painting as painting with more awareness, trying to recall all that I have learned, and actually slowing down and applying it to the process, and not discovering at critique time what I should have actually done. I know so much theory from all my reading, but because it is more learned than practiced, I forget half of it when I start to paint.
Today, I told myself that there is an invisible teacher sitting on my shoulder, talking me through the process.
Big Shapes, she whispered, and I looked for the big shapes.
Value Studies, she said, and then added, at least four. So I obediently did one and loved it. Then I forced myself to do another, and another. I didn't do the fourth one because I was happy with the third one. She wasn't pleased.
Focal point, she said, and I searched to where my eye was naturally drawn in this scene - around the base of the hills on the left, onto the next base until I felt myself stop and start to wonder what was around that corner? THAT was where my eye settled. So that is the focal point. But, there was nothing there.
Then the voice said - artistic license. So I imagined a boat or a raft or a kayak - it was, after all, a lake. I thought I would Google images for figures on a kayak later. After I had finished sketching the scene and was about to go on my phone for boating figures, a swarm of rafters came into the scene and I hurriedly clicked pictures. Synchronicity? Of course!
Then the voice asked me how I would paint this so that the viewer's eye went exactly where I wanted it to go. Manipulation of the highest order? Yes, just like carefully-crafted scenes from cinema. So instead of a flat green lake, which it was, I faded the green into a bright sunlit patch where the boat was going to be, near where my eye settled, following the lines of the hills, and painted the figures dark and detailed right there, complete with reflections.
Well done, she said. Small shapes at focal point.
I enjoyed her assistance. I will call her Camilla.
This is from the Thursday paintsite today at Stevens Creek Canyon Park.
Today, I told myself that there is an invisible teacher sitting on my shoulder, talking me through the process.
Big Shapes, she whispered, and I looked for the big shapes.
Value Studies, she said, and then added, at least four. So I obediently did one and loved it. Then I forced myself to do another, and another. I didn't do the fourth one because I was happy with the third one. She wasn't pleased.
Focal point, she said, and I searched to where my eye was naturally drawn in this scene - around the base of the hills on the left, onto the next base until I felt myself stop and start to wonder what was around that corner? THAT was where my eye settled. So that is the focal point. But, there was nothing there.
Then the voice said - artistic license. So I imagined a boat or a raft or a kayak - it was, after all, a lake. I thought I would Google images for figures on a kayak later. After I had finished sketching the scene and was about to go on my phone for boating figures, a swarm of rafters came into the scene and I hurriedly clicked pictures. Synchronicity? Of course!
Then the voice asked me how I would paint this so that the viewer's eye went exactly where I wanted it to go. Manipulation of the highest order? Yes, just like carefully-crafted scenes from cinema. So instead of a flat green lake, which it was, I faded the green into a bright sunlit patch where the boat was going to be, near where my eye settled, following the lines of the hills, and painted the figures dark and detailed right there, complete with reflections.
Well done, she said. Small shapes at focal point.
I enjoyed her assistance. I will call her Camilla.
This is from the Thursday paintsite today at Stevens Creek Canyon Park.
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