What to paint

For the majority of my journey into oil painting, I’ve been primarily focused on learning how to paint. Since I paint representationally, that includes things like drawing in proportion and mixing colors, etc. I’ve taken workshops for portraiture and still life to help with the learning curve, and I think it has helped. But, what I seem to run into all the time is finding subjects I’m really excited about.

Take still life, for example. I don’t think the world needs yet another painting of fruit or flowers. But, painting fruit and flowers is a great way to learn fundamental skills in oil painting. (Note: if you love paining fruit and flowers, you should absolutely do it! But since I don’t, I wouldn’t be doing it to scratch my artistic itch. I’d be doing it just to “do it”.)

I know there’s validity to the thinking that it doesn’t matter what you paint as long as you paint it well — even something banal can be lit in such a way to evoke drama and beauty, etc. I’m sure that’s true. But given an almost infinite number of things to light and paint with beauty and drama, why not pick something of interest to you?

This is where I’m at. I’m painting every weekend, and I have a lot of material from places like UPsplash to use as references. I won’t get better at painting by not painting, so I’m going to paint what I have. I’ll even do more still life work. I’m thinking of maybe doing a book series, but it may turn out to be boring, so we’ll see.

So, while I’m going to keep on painting, I’m also going to try and work on finding more interesting things to paint, and find more interesting ways to “see” them (lighting, composition, etc.). I’ll try to work on the drama and beauty in the lighting of the subject as well as finding subjects that scratch my itch.