Through the eyes of a child.

I have written before about “painting what you see” and I wish to add to that thought. Paint what you see, sounds simple, but it is not and it has taken me a while to grasp what Monet was saying. Paint what you see? OK. Look out over nature and what do you see? A tree, mountains, a pond, flowers, the sky, etc, etc. But this is too simple and it involves more than one might think. What you see is light reflected off of the objects that exist out there. Your eyes see the light, your mind is telling you that what you see is a tree, a pond, or whatever.

When painting you should block out these preconceived ideas. Paint the colors of the light that you see reflected in the scene. Do not paint what your mind is telling you a tree looks like, for this is not the truth of what you are actually seeing. If you try to paint what your mind is telling you a tree looks like, you will struggle with it and try to paint a tree instead of the reflected light that your eyes perceive. If you paint the dark areas and the light areas, and give these reflections the color that you perceive at the moment, the picture will appear. Someone said that the best way to paint is through the eyes of an infant because a child sees the true reflected light . Without the experience of what “things” are and placing a meaning to these objects, a child perceives what his or her eyes see. Plato’s world of ideas does not serve the painter well in this regard. Knowing what a tree is and what it looks like can impair your ability to paint what you see. Gabrielle Crepaldi said of the Impressionists, “{I}n brief, one can say that they like to present that which the human eye sees, and not that which the mind reconstructs.”

So, I have come to learn that the phrase, “paint what you see” is a bit more complicated that it seems.