Bob Ross was Right!

I've been thinking about Lucien Freud this week because I have this quote of his pinned to my studio notice board.

"I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen … that if painters did know what was going to happen, they wouldn't bother to do it."

I think a lot of people imagine that you must plan if you are making a realistic painting, and I think to some extent this is true. If your painting is based on something real, there is a degree of planning. You must choose the landscape view you're interested in, or decide how to arrange your still life. In my case, working from old photographs, I must decide on an initial composition, and perhaps on what I will crop from the photograph.

But I think we have to keep those initial decisions very loose. We must be willing to rearrange the apples on our canvas, to make them more interesting, or to eliminate a troublesome tree from our landscape composition.

In my case, I'm finding that each painting has a mind of its own and pretty quickly tells me where it wants to go. This happens in various ways, but generally through what Bob Ross called "a happy accident."

I will be working on a painting and enjoying the process, developing the composition in just the way I had planned, and then something will happen and it's as if a light bulb is turned on.

"Aha! That's what needs to happen!"

From that point on, my job is not to control the painting but to try to guide it to wherever it wants to go.

One painting wasn't going well because I couldn't get the face right. That was quite strange as I have no problem with faces ... until I realised "oh this one doesn't want to a face!" (see video below for more on this one).

Another wasn't going well until I sanded it back and realised that one figure wanted to be less clear and defined than I had been making it. The happy accident of the sanding showed me the way.

And this makes painting an exciting thing to do - every single painting is a journey into the unknown. As Freud says, if we knew where we were going, it would be boring to take the trip. But instead, every piece is a discovery.

That doesn't mean that we're not employing skills as artists - we need all our knowledge and skill to help guide what happens but it does mean we're not in charge in the way we might have thought at the outset.

I find this a great lesson for life as well ... sure, we can set sail for some destination we've chosen... but we have to be open to the idea that the universe has other plans.