Beware of Falling in Love

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

South Side of Skye 40 x 25” Oil Thomas Paquette

Painting is an act of creativity and intention, but it sometimes, many times, includes acts of destruction large and small. It may be that the one skill that separates the dedicated professional artist from the amateur is the willingness to destroy, obliterate or remove those beautifully painted parts of a painting that, in the artist’s judgement, must be changed in order to make the painting work as a whole. The temptation to fall in love with a beautifully painted passage and then hang on to it even when it interferes with the success of the work is completely understandable. Painting well is hard work, and going backward to move forward is perhaps not a natural inclination for many of us.

John Singer Sargent used to scrape out areas that he was not happy with and repaint them in order to get his famous bravura brushstrokes in the finish. In the first issue of the recently revived Plein Air magazine, Dan Christens…