Landscape Painting Isn’t About Landscape

today i just wanted to have a little chat about some of the things i think about um while i'm painting and also some of the things i think about while i'm teaching as well i've done a lot of teaching over the years and um the ideas kind of change and develop and specifically you know what i want to talk about today is obviously seeing the title of the video and uh it's one of those things that um you may or may not agree with um i mean the thing is you if you want uh if you want everyone to agree with you then putting things out on the internet is probably not the best way of going about it so you know you can feel free to uh to disagree um but it's just this is something that occurs to me and uh it's something that i think about a lot while while i'm painting is about how personal painting is and specifically for me how personal landscape painting is so like i was saying you know i've done a lot of teaching over the years i've done a lot of workshops where i have you know groups of people with me and we go out into the landscape so you know i may have 10 12 people you know out in the landscape we'll go up a hill somewhere or along the river and essentially on the first day and second day of the workshops we usually do a lot of sketching so i'll have people with me and particularly on the first day i say keep it really simple keep everything down to a minimum the materials that you're using down to a minimum so you can really focus on looking to see what's there so you're not faffing around with different materials or trying to mix colors and all that kind of stuff so on this first day what we usually do is we have just charcoal and paper and maybe a bit of water and a brush but that's kind of essentially it's charcoal on paper and so we have a whole group of people like i said about 10 or 12 people will go out so we're all in the same place and we've all got the same materials same time of day [Music] but everybody's work and this is the crucial thing everybody's work is always different now obviously there is skill levels can change from person to person but beyond that i think it goes a bit deeper than that because when we bring the work back to the studio we're kind of looking through it there's a clear personal connection that people have and whatever skill level they're that they do tend to see things everybody tends to see the landscape slightly differently and so what i've come to realize over the years that like in the title for this video the landscape painting isn't really about landscape it's about you as a person and it's about how you react to it so clearly there's a there's a documentary element to to working outside you see something uh trees rivers sky clouds whatever and you try and do something on your paper which expresses that but beyond that documentary um part of the work there's the expressive part of the work and that's where the individuality comes in and um i'm always constantly amazed by how different different people's work is um so i just wanted to talk about that and i'm just going to go through a couple of my own pieces of work and just talk about how that difference in how the difference between documenting the things in front of you and expressing yourself so i was just looking through this um this book of mine here and there's a photo of me painting by the sea so you know you can see that there's the beach and the rocks the sea the horizon the sky you know and everything is there and it's frozen in this kind of frozen moment um it doesn't tell you a huge amount about it but the painting what i was doing is this one here and again you've got the rocks and the waves and the sea but in this painting it's much more um about me trying to express how i feel about the landscape trying to get the movement in there making marks which are very much about um things not being frozen not being this point in time but actually trying to express that sense of motion and action and so in the painting this is much more about me this is what i'm talking about this is about how i was feeling while i was there it was energetic and everything was moving so i'm trying to make marks that express that if you go back to the photograph painting you know it's a frozen point in time and everything has stopped and this is never going to change but i feel that the painting is much more about showing the passage of time and things are still moving still happening and that's the kind of thing that i'm trying to get into my painting so i have another painting here which i i suppose is a little bit more conventional in terms of the composition it's got the kind of land uh bit down the bottom and the sky bit at the top so but beyond that kind of fairly conventional composition there's a lot of marks in here which are very much about how i was feeling at the time it's an autumn day there's a lot of movement there's a lot of wind and a lot of these marks are about trying to express that passage of the air moving around me and how i was feeling about it you know feeling that sense of light and space and trying to get some of that into the painting so i think if i wanted to approach the painting in a more documentary way if i wanted to be uh more literal about where things are there's a tree there's a gate there's a hill um i would just have to paint in a slightly different way but this this painting isn't about that it's not documentary it's not about saying this was here and this was here at this particular point in time it's much more about me and it's about how i felt about the landscape while i was sitting there doing it and i also feel that it contains the the passage of time that i spent doing it as well it's not this kind of photographic frozen moment it's much more about the time that i spent doing the painting and what i was feeling while i was doing it so it may seem completely obvious to some of you to say that painting is personal because of course it's of course painting is personal and i think it exists on its spectrum from uh completely abstract to hyperrealism but where we position ourselves on that spectrum is where the individuality comes in and where the expressing of our own personality comes through in the painting there's no right or wrong here i'm not suggesting for a minute that one kind of painting is inherently better or more important than any other kind for me personally i like to sort of walk a tightrope between describing the things that i see on the one hand and expressing how i feel about them on the other and trying to get all of that into the painting at the same time but you know that's just me so anyway i hope you found this little discussion useful i probably rambled a little bit and went off topic but you know um not much i can do about that that's just me um again thanks for watching um you know the channel is growing quite quickly at the moment which i'm really happy about and again still got loads more people watching than i thought i ever would so if you're not subscribed please do and i'll see you on the next one thanks

Channel: Lewis Noble Artist

Views: 44,458

Rating: 4.9327731 out of 5

Keywords: Artist, landscape, paintings, fine art, Lewis Noble, peak district paintings, oil paintings, acrylic paintings, artist talks, art demonstration, plein air painting, art courses, art workshops, art tutor, paint with me, Art courses Cornwall, Art Courses Yorkshire, Art Courses Derbyshire, Northumberland, seascape, SKETCHBOOKS, sketching, landscape sketch, lewis noble artist, acrylic sketching, Charcoal drawing, Compressed Charcoal

Id: 7fmD-lZ7OnI

Length: 7min 56sec (476 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020