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Nature has always been my best teacher, but we also learn from art and other artists as well.  The Hudson River School artists from the mid nineteenth century and some of their disciples, particularly those who painted the West, inspire me to paint more realistically than I might otherwise.  It’s always a thrill to locate the spots where they painted and compare their paintings to photographs of the time.  Even better than that, I love to find their locations and paint my own versions.  That’s when I discover how much artistic license they took with the scene to make a painting rather than merely document the scene as a photo might.  In the spirit of documentation I will share examples of my own paintings and photos of the locations, demonstrating my interpretations of the scenes in these paintings.

In my painting of the Grand Teton I chose to leave out the dam from Jackson Lake.  I walked up to the dam to sketch the mountain as I imagined seeing more of the mountain than this location allowed.  Jackson Lake is a natural lake, but beginning in 1906 it was dammed up to create a reservoir to store more water for use downstream.  I imagined that it could have looked much like I painted it, if only I had the opportunity to go back in time.  That is one way I can use my artistic license.

Another way I use my license to create is when I work from photos.  Sometimes I use a tree or rock from one photo and add it to my painting of distant views from another photo.  In the painting of the Sangre De Cristo Mountains in New Mexico posted at the top of this article, I worked from the photo below, taken in November 2012, and tried to imagine how it might look in October and at an earlier time of the day.  Some artists work exclusively from their imagination in this way.

I can think of several ways to improve on my painting.  The most obvious would be to go back to Nature--drive to New Mexico next October and paint from life.  Another way would be to continue using my artistic license and work more from the painting and less from the photo.  I can start with drawing, building shapes and reorganizing them on paper.  I can let my pencil do the work, drawing more from my imagination and less from the photo.  You can see how I've compressed the image in the painting from the material in the photo.  I can compress even more material if I use perspective to back up and away from the foreground trees, just one more way I'm imagining athe next painting in the series.