I know exactly when I learned to draw. It was April 1959 and I was six and a quarter. I had just drawn a man in a hat that I was rather proud of and I showed it to my Dad. He suggested that I really look at how a hat set on a man’s head. I had drawn it fully on top of the head, kind of balancing up there and he drew an example sketch to show how it really came part of the way down the head! (Remember in 1959 it was before JFK convinced men that they did not need to wear hats!)
I was able to copy his lesson pretty well. Wow! What a concept! To draw something all you really had to do was really **look** at it. I’ve had many art classes as an adult that said basically the same thing. The book I was looking at by Kevin Macpherson to try to get back into landscape painting says it too: “Paint what you see, not what you know”.
So when I started the painting below on location in Piscataway Park, I was trying to really look at the water since that seemed challenging. Kevin also says, “All paintings are lessons for the next.”
