See the Forest

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Lavender Field Oil John Hulsey

“Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.”
― Khalil Gibran

Perhaps the biggest challenge for those of us who paint from life is to see and understand what is right before our eyes. This may sound simple, but it is anything but, and it takes unrelenting practice to get good at it. Why this is so has partly to do with the way our brains are wired, partly to do with our visual biases, and partly to do with the sheer complexity of the world. Learning to see the world in terms of paint requires the unlearning of some visual habits and the acquisition of some new skills of observation. It is important and useful to learn to see masses and shape and to reduce the hundreds of smaller shapes into a few larger, simpler masses.

Trees are a perfect subject for this study, because they are complex forms, and at first glance may appear chaotic in their o…