Path to the Sea 6x8
The Painting Process
"Path to the Sea." is 6x8 inches and I painted it last week. I'm very happy to share it with you today. Hopefully I can give you some insight into my processes that will maybe help if you're interested in painting something similar.
I'm working on MDF which I prefer for smaller sizes as it's quite stable. The board has been prepped with two coats of house paint. I’ve done the underpainting using straight burnt umber. This board has been tinted to be a muted burnt umber/raw umber tone. It has enough red to support what I do tonally and set up vibration, but isn't so red that I'll have bright red bits screaming around objects where painted sections meet.
Path to the Sea 6x8
The Inspiration
The reference was put together digitally. I was looking at an old painting composition that was quite odd, and what emerged here was a happy accident with the path and I added the ocean to the background. That could just as easily a little valley with hills. Living in New Zealand, there's a real appreciation for coastal scenes. We have a lot of coast, amazing beaches, and tourism that's attracted to these features, especially here up north. While popping in the odd ocean piece helps me sell more paintings, creating beautiful work is what I truly am about.
The Value of Creativity
The feeling you get from creating something is one of the best feelings life can provide. Perhaps being a parent is comparable, and actually, you are the parent of the painting you're creating. It's wonderful to build on the creative process over time. I've been creating art my whole life, but I've been working with oil painting specifically since 2009. Since then, I've devoted almost every day to painting, and when I'm not painting, I'm looking forward to the next time I can. I'm always trying to improve and better express what I'm feeling through paint.
No matter your personality, doing something creative is rewarding—far more so than activities like playing video games. While games might require creative thinking for solving puzzles or strategizing, you don't have much to show for your time. Whatever game you mastered a year or two ago is now old, and you're then looking for something new. It's just entertainment, and what have you got to show for your time?
Tangible Results of Creative Work
Speaking of tangible results, I wrote my first book because I would get the same questions on my channel repeatedly. With thousands of videos, finding specific information can be difficult. I'll ship my book to you about painting in a tonal manner anywhere on the planet for $60 USD, international shipping included!
My Artistic Journey
I chose art at a fairly young age because I reasoned it would be a good potential career for my temperament. I came from a family where you were expected to move on after 18—not like today where you might stay home until 30, 40, or 50. Most other careers I contemplated weren't as interesting to me as making art.
Art can pay well. When I was a commercial artist, I made a good living, which was a dream come true—getting paid regularly to create art was wonderful, until it wasn't. I've covered that in my blog and will address it more in the future.
Art in a Changing World
We're in a post-scarcity age, even though many societal mechanisms still operate on scarcity principles. We have people who are rich and some infinitely richer than others. I don't know how the work vs income thing it will sort itself out, but it will. The Industrial Revolution employed many people running lots of machines, but as we've progressed, physical repetitive jobs have been replaced by robotics. Employment moved to the service sector, but that's now being massively impacted too.
I'm not coming from a place of fear—I think these changes will be positive. It's always bothered me how we're expected to spend our days doing jobs we don't care about just to pay bills. This drove me to find something meaningful to spend my time on, which was making art. From that point, I developed my abilities daily, working on drawing. I didn't get much into painting until my 40s, though as a commercial artist I did a lot of digital painting. I would draw assignments with pencil or pen, scan them into the computer, then color and illustrate digitally.
Digital vs. Physical Art
Digital art is wonderful, and I was intoxicated with it for a long time, but it has one big drawback: everything that comes into the real world from the digital world is a reproduction of something that never had physical embodiment. You can make awesome prints with great color depth and resolution—I have a printer right by my elbow—but my heart isn't in print making or print selling. In our post-scarcity world, there's no shortage of reproductions available. What makes any painting special is that it's one of a kind. If it moves you and speaks to you, you have the benefit of knowing it's unique. Yes, I can take a good photo and make reproductions, but the painting itself is singular.
I'm not shy about repainting scenes—if you've followed the channel, you might recognize compositions I've painted before. But even when I paint the same scene within weeks, there are innumerable differences. Both paintings will be one of a kind, which is intrinsically valuable.
As we move into a post-scarcity world where people may no longer need to work jobs they dislike just to pay bills, we'll face questions about how to spend our time. Making beautiful one-of-a-kind objects seems like a great answer. Maybe you're into painting, or perhaps something else. Whatever it is, go for it!
Until next time, take good care of yourself and stay out of trouble.
Cheers,
Mike