When my partner and I were at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for the Winslow Homer exhibit, we took the opportunity to look at some other rooms of art, too, paying especial attention to local art. One painting I found myself drawn to was called “The Pool, Medfield,” by Dennis Miller Bunker (1889).
“What do you like about it?” asked J, clearly not getting why I liked this boring picture of grass.
I stared for a moment and then pointed to the upper right corner of the grassy area. “That one strip of turquoise.”
This confounded J even more. It wasn’t something they had noticed and it wasn’t something they found interesting even when it was pointed out.
With more time to think about it, I would say that I like this painting because it is a normal scene that reminds me of places I have been. It was painted over a century ago and surely that specific field has been developed since then, but all the same, I have been there. It feels true, and specific.
I like the little bit of turquoise because it’s surprising – it’s not just a continuation of the grass in the same surrounding green color. It’s also purposeful; it communicates something. The cool, bluish color creates a sense of depth and lushness. It looks misty, like morning dew, giving the scene a specific sense of time of day, seasonality, temperature. I can feel scene, a cool, damp, early morning breeze on a day that will be hot. I feel that I can hear the scene: a babbling brook, cicadas, crows in the distance.
But in the moment all I could identify was, “I like that bit of turquoise in the upper right.”
I don’t tell this story to knock J for being a philistine, or to paint myself as some sort of art expert, but to point out that everybody notices something different! J liked plenty of art in the museum that didn’t do it for me. And when we compared notes on what we both liked, we often liked it for different reasons, or liked different parts.
For each person, what you notice and what you are drawn to are particular to you and who you are. The fact that a different person can look at the same piece of art that you love and like something different, or not like it at all, just speaks to the individuality of aesthetic preference.
Everybody notices something different
This principle carries over from art to real life. I’m often stopped in my tracks by some real-life skyscape that others don’t seem to notice or find remarkable. People look at me with suspicion when I take photos because they don’t see what it is I could possibly be taking pictures of. There’s nothing there.
Recently a woman scolded me on the street. “Why are you taking pictures of my house??”
“I’m not,” I said. “I’m taking pictures of the sunset. Look at the sky. It’s pink!”
“Oh,” she said, instantly bored.
Everyone pays attention to something different. When this woman looked at the street corner, she saw her house; the sky a blank. I saw the inverse: just the sky; the house might as well have been one of those buildings on Google Maps that’s blurred out (and probably it is, considering her weirdness about having it photographed).
“What’s interesting” is not obvious
When painting from references, I often find myself turning off my brain and simply trying to replicate the exact shapes and colors that I see in the photograph. I’m never successful, of course, and when I do Photo to Painting posts, I often comment on the things I “got wrong.” I’m not sure I really truly understood until recently that my goal as an artist isn’t to replicate what is in the reference exactly. I am not a camera. We have those; we don’t need people to do it.
I think I just implicitly assumed that if I faithfully and skillfully drew what I saw, or what I’d photographed, that other people would automatically understand what I found interesting about the image. But the more I continue to paint and learn about art and observe people’s reactions to my art, the more I realize that’s not true. “What is interesting” feels obvious to me, but it’s not. Other people don’t know what I like about a scene from a photo I took, or a painting painstakingly copied from the photo, any more than they know what I like about a real-life scene we’re both standing in front of.
I need to use my art to show what’s interesting. What I’m paying attention to. What I’m seeing. It’s not obvious. And it’s not necessarily what other people are seeing, not at all.
Your style is what you pay attention to
I’ve often struggled to define artistic style. What should be my style? What does it even mean to have a style?
My current theory is that your style is what you pay attention to. That’s your starting place: what you like; what you’re drawn to; what you notice. That’s the bedrock from which you make choices about what subjects to paint, and how to paint them; what to include; what to emphasize.
The nice part about this theory is that it means I don’t have to make decisions about my style. Not exactly. It’s more like I have to observe myself, and notice what is natural to me. I am drawn to skies, colors, and specifically to color shifts.(Watercolor, the medium of color shifts, is obviously a good one for me.)
Not everybody notices the same things out in the world. My job, as an artist, is to make art that draws the viewer’s attention to the things I care about; simplifies everything else; and helps others see what I am seeing.
By looking at someone else’s art, you can see what they see, what they notice, what they think is important. It’s the closest you get to seeing through someone else’s eyes.