Having written in my last post about my “quirky” watercolor technique, I feel that I must add a few words regarding my feelings about the place that technique holds (or should hold) in an artist’s work.
Our journey as an artist usually begins with learning a medium and its techniques. With that accomplished, we think we have it made in the shade! Or, we feel like we will have it made in the shade once we get there. However, many artists get to a place where they know their medium well and have learned a lot of painting techniques but their paintings fail to satisfy them. They feel that perhaps something is missing. Consider yourself lucky if that describes you! The search for “the missing ingredient” is probably the beginning of our real growth as artists. I have come to realize in my life and in my art that I will always be searching for some new “missing ingredient”, and that delights me because I know that the search is necessary if I am to continue growing as a person and as an artist.
Mastering a medium and its techniques is not the final goal, it is only step one. In other words, technique is not the end, it is simply a means.
Happy Painting!
what great insight! I am at the ‘learn the technique so it becomes second nature’ stage…drawing the human form…i am filling pages in my sketch book with hands…from all angles…I am copying art books of Michaelangelo and Bottocelli (great hands!)…my goal is to learn to draw them until I can just draw them with out the agony and effort it currently takes me…
a bonus: my 9 year old granddaughter is watching me go through the process and when she sees me she asks me how my hands are coming… and I am thrilled because I have so often said to her ‘practice, practine, practince’…and now she can see me following my own advice.
I also like what you said about looking for what is missing in my art…as I am also at that point…or was- and so I then started on the hand drawings…
Elizabeth