Apr 07 2007
About Seascape Artist
4/7/07: Enjoying painting is a gift we give ourselves. Painting is a lot of fun! It is also a lot of hard work. I love the sea … I want to learn to sail … I love to watch the water but I cannot swim … when I first started painting in oils .. no one had told me that water was one of the hardest things to paint and that it would drive me crazy trying … so I painted water … and people told me how much they liked my water in all my oil paintings - the very first painting I ever sold had a ship coming out of fog in the water.
Then I took a class with an artist in Iowa who had been painting for many years and teaching classes for many years too … she mentioned to the entire class just how hard it is to paint water and that even after years of doing so … she still fails miserably many times.
I did not say a word … this artist then went on to to tell us that painting on black canvas is extremely difficult also and only true professionals do it well and we should do our best to avoid trying until we had learned enough to feel comfortable trying and failing. I did not mention that I had been painting on black canvas with Bob Ross paintings for some time and that I found it to be lots of fun and no harder than anything else in painting.
That was my first lesson that different things in painting are harder for some than others.
For example, I cannot do the Bob Ross method of painting snow on the mountain … I know how .. I just do not have the vision to do it accurately … with no depth perception … I can be an inch away from the canvas and not even grazing it .. or I can be pressing the knife way to hard on the canvas and nearly cutting it through. I learned other ways to deal with creating snow on the mountain … rocks are rather difficult for me … I think part of it is that I do not see them the way others do and I forget to try for the 3D look of them.
The main thing I want to stress in marine and seascape painting is that you really need to enjoy it and enjoy watching the water or objects that go into tropical painting.
I watched a man painting a seascape in watercolors at the beach in Galveston one day - he did an okay job but after he was done … he made a comment that surprised me … his comment was how glad he was that this assignment for an art class was over and how much he hates painting the ocean and how he would never paint another ocean picture now that he was done with the class.
We talked for a few minutes and it turns out that watching the ocean makes him feel seasick and dizzy - he didn’t know it when he signed up for a seascape watercolor class … but he certainly found out quickly … the assignment was to paint 1 ocean / beach painting per week for 6 weeks. He wanted to learn everything he could about it … he expected to be able to use the skills learned in landscape and still life paintings - he wanted to paint water drops on leaves and farm ponds for example - he was planning on moving to the Midwest where there is no ocean at all though after spending so much time being sick at the beach.
You’ll know fairly quickly if you like seascape or marine painting if you are new to it … there are so many aspects to it though that you never have to paint actual water to be a marine artist … harbor scenes with piers and boat houses and ropes and birds are very fun and popular too.
Enjoy painting or photographing marine subjects - find your focal point … capture the moment … share the moment!
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