Collecting Your Own Reference

Collecting your own reference opposed to using someone else's is a sacred part of an artist's process. Without it, you are missing-out on a multitude of factors including emotional content. If you want to go beyond your reference you must experience the thing first-hand. For example, by taking this photo myself I had the opportunity to experience the moment and all its immeasurable details. I became intoxicated by the event, smelt the horses, felt the thumping of their hooves, heard the sounds of the crowd, befriended the culture, placed my bets on the horses and so-on and so-forth. Not to mention the experience as a whole gave me an invaluable sense of time and place. A true human experience. An experience that created a story which sounds more like a bundle of emotions than just an account of events. Life is art and art is life. And so, your life and your life's experiences collectively make-up your art. This emotional content gathered from the experience of living is what makes art so powerful and is very much irreplaceable. If you want to make good art, profound art, then I suggest taking-in and experiencing as much of life has to offer... then make it.

Class demos

Honey Bear, 10x8 inches

These exercises are a lot of fun. They're not large or complicated so I feel like I can just paint. I can paint like a child and not worry about creating my next great contribution that will shake the core of the Art World. I paint like a child and without my critic. I completely let go and use what I have learned about painting only if it occurs to me.

Jar of Olives, 7x5 inches

I may now concentrate on one fundamental of painting at a time and not get overwhelmed. Perhaps in this exercise my focus was about brush stroke and becoming intimate with all the different ways of applying the paint. Do I use a brush, a palette knife, the handle of a brush, a shoe or do I scrape into the canvas with a palette knife? I want to become intimate with and feel each stroke as if time has slowed down. I feel and become more sensitive to the amount of pressure applied to each stroke as well as how much paint is being loaded into the bristles.
 

Marmalade, 8x10 inches

In this exercise my focus was on using brown and black to tint my colors. I found that if I used black (or varying shades of it) to tint orange, the oranges turned more of a green. If I used brown (or varying shades of it) to tint orange, the oranges stayed warmer. And, if I used brown and black together the orange would become darker or lighter without leaning toward green or brown. The same was applied to all the other colors. Because of this, I used more gray in the light side and more browns in the shade side to imply the warm and cool of the natural light conditions (warmer shadows and cooler lights).

Water Bottle, 10x8 inches

This exercise I used just black and it's varying shades of grays to tint my colors. Super simple. Super easy. Even a kid can do it.