Blog

Hello Everyone,

To say that these are strange days is an understatement I know. Most of our lives have been turned upside down over the past few months, and we have all had to find ways to cope and to adapt. And it is far too easy to see so many others who have had their lives far more unsettled than our own. So we find new ways to be grateful, to help, to be engaged with the world, and connected with our own creativity.

As a painter, I know that I am more fortunate than many. I can still paint wherever I happen to be and also because the practice of art has always been a largely solitary endeavor.  Yes. I do miss my groups and I miss being able to travel to paint and socialize with my friends and fellow artists.  But on the other hand, this period at home has afforded me the opportunity to reassess how, what, and why I paint, and to improve and deepen my own powers of observation and expression.

In that vein, I wanted to share with you some of my recent thoughts about the creative process.  Below is an excerpt taken from an article I recently wrote for "Watercolor Artist Magazine". I believe it will be printed in the December 2020 issue.  When travel is such an integral part of your professional life, it becomes a matter of course sometimes that ta great many of the subjects for painting become the people places and things you encounter on the road, and far from home. And since all that has changed - at least for the time being - I am spending a lot of time exploring alternatives to painting that springs from direct site observation. In all ways, I am looking more closely at where I am - in all ways. In short, I am looking a bit more inward rather than outward these days. There are landscapes and paintings to be found everywhere. You only need to look in other ways, and in other directions. 

Hoping you all are keeping safe and well. And hope to see you all again one day down the road. 

All my best wishes and happy painting,

Tom 

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As a young student of art, I often heard the phrase, “Mother nature is the best teacher”. The implication from instructors was that an aspiring painter could hope to do no more than to honor and reflect - as honestly as possible - the world that we see around us every day.   And naturally, any painter cannot help but have their work improve by ardent study of the light and atmosphere, the people, places, and things that compose the observable environment in which we live.

But even as a very inexperienced painter, I knew that if I had any hope of one day developing a unique style – an artistic voice of my own – that I had to channel in some way what it was that most inspired me to paint in the first place.  And for me, while I loved to study what I see “out there” as I move through the world, I also gain equally from a study of what I see on the inside – within my own internal world of dreams, memories, and imagination.

Many years have passed since I was that young student, and I have been so fortunate to have finally achieved my dream of becoming a professional artist. But even now, I meet many fellow artists and students of art who feel that no subject is worth painting unless they are standing directly in front of it, so that they may produce a very life-like “replica”. This breaks my heart a bit.  I am grateful for all the many compliments I have received about my work over the years.  But if I am honest, the one comment that unfailingly makes me wince is, “Oh, it looks just like a photograph!”  I know this is meant with the very best of intentions, but as I painter, it is the very last thing that I ever want my work to be.  I am not an abstract painter, so yes, my work often may look like something quite recognizable and “real”, but it rarely is. 

Over time, I have come to believe that my job as an artist is never to try to copy or replicate what I see, but rather to interpret it. In other words, I try not to paint what I see, but rather how I feel about, how I react to, what I see.  And what I see is just as likely to be found in the internal as much as the external world.

Teaching has been a very large part of my life over the years, and so I have been so fortunate to travel around all over the world to paint in some of the most wondrous places imaginable. And plein-air – or onsite – painting has been an integral component of my teaching.  Naturally, if you find yourself in some amazing place like Shanghai, Moscow, London, Rome, or the Catalonian coast for example, painting the beauty of actual scenes is an undeniably compelling thing to do.  But so often, I see students struggle with the demon of “accuracy” and duplication.  It is such a revelation when you finally learn that any scene, no matter how gorgeous, is just a starting point for a painting.  It is one reality only.  Your reaction to it is another, and your interpretation is yet another reality still. This is the one that most matters,  for it is the stuff of art.   

Then there are times in all our lives when we cannot travel. Any number of constraints – physical, familial, professional, or financial may keep up much closer to home than we might wish. For some – myself included – constant travel became a way of life. But the downside is that it can begin to fool us into thinking that travel to some far-flung place is the only way to find inspiration for paintings. This is so wrong. Great paintings are everywhere, wherever we are, just waiting to be found. They’re in our back yards, on our kitchen counters, inside our own minds. A wise painter once told me, “There are no bad subjects to paint, only bad paintings”. And another great artist, Chuck Close, famously said, “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just get to work.” These may sound like harsh words, but there is much truth in them.  If you want to paint, if you need to paint, you will paint.  The genesis of all art I think is found not in what we see, but rather in how we choose to look.

Lately, I have found enormous joy in investigating my sketchbooks, and in rummaging through my memory, as well as paying close attention to my dreams.  I keep a sketchbook by my bed and jot down anything that pops into my mind. I’m constantly amazed by what can be made of the simplest, most abstract idea. We all have such deep wells of creativity and I urge you all to have a closer look. We have vast sources of material that we hold inside, a kind of visual library that we can tap into whenever and wherever we choose. Throughout our lives, whatever we have seen, or heard, or felt, or thought of, is all there just waiting to be interpreted into our next painting.

I have the utmost respect for Mother Nature. But I think the external landscapes she provides for our inspection are just the beginning of her lessons.  She also has gifted us with a vast internal landscape that can amaze and inspire us for the rest of our lives, no matter where we happen to find ourselves. Don’t hesitate to explore those cities and those shores as well. 

Thomas W Schaller

Los Angeles

August 2020