Knowing Your Subject
I really believe that you do need to know your subject. When I say “know it” I mean you intimately have to have spent time with it. Whatever this might look like for you. If you are painting animals, then you need to spend a lot of time with animals a lot. If you paint landscapes, you need to be out walking, painting, and spending time with the landscape. Specifically, a landscape that’s around you. These days, painting landscapes for me is what I see day in and day out in the Sonoran desert where I live. But, it does not matter what landscape it is, it just has to be somewhere you have spent a lot of time with.
“I really believe in order for art to have a true soul, it needs to come from an emotional connection with the artist.”
The mechanics of things like learning basic color mixing and drawing and all of the fundamental things, do not get “awards” for this. I am paraphrasing this, but the fundamentals being mastered are expected in a good piece of art. We have to learn these fundamentals and get them down and then you can possibly create art. I have painted some of my best paintings of subject matter that I really knew and spent time with. This is not to say you can’t paint something that is far away from your home or natural area, but as far as having a deep soul connection to it, it should be a subject you spend time with. Whatever this may be for you personally.
If you paint still life, like flowers, it is good to have a garden or at least be around flowers a lot. You have to understand them and be connected with them. I hope you can see where I am going with this. I really believe in order for art to have a true soul, it needs to come from an emotional connection with the artist. It is similar to a collector who buys a piece. They are choosing it because of some sort of connection. But, as a creator of the piece, you should be spending, or have spent, intimate time with the subject matter in order to understand it. It is often easy to tell when a painting had no connection with the artist who painted it. It is like reading literature that has fancy vocabulary but no substance. You will notice an improvement in your work if you start painting a subject matter you are connected with.
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