Embrace Familiarity with your References
You find the perfect spot or take a beautiful photo. Then you paint it… does that mean it’s done for you forever as a reference?
Carolyn Lord, Ep.21, says no. In fact, there are many benefits to revisiting a reference again and again.
Lord loves coming back to subjects she’s painted before. Maybe it’s a particular cliff in Mendocino. Maybe it’s her garden when the sunflowers bloom.
She calls them motifs. And when she returns to the same subject again and again, that familiarity opens up new avenues for thinking. She notices details she hadn’t the first time through and she tries new things.
Put it to Practice:
When we think of artists, we often think that they and us are connoisseurs of the new. Trying new paints. New subjects. New references. New ideas.
But new ideas are hard to play with if everything is new all the time. Especially when it comes to what you paint.
So whether you paint from life or photos, there is no rule that says One-And -Done. You're allowed to use a reference more than once.
In fact, many guests on the show highly encourage it. Because like Lord, the more you become familiar with something the freer you’ll find yourself with it.
You’ll find better design opportunities within it. You’ll paint looser (if that’s your style goal.) You’ll feel less precious and will be willing to try new things. The whole experience may just FEEL BETTER because you’re already familiar with what you’re painting.
All of those will help you create a potentially more dynamic painting. And a lot of them only happen on a second, third, or heck, 20th revisiting.
You don't have to use it exactly the same way you did the first time.
Crop in. Change your color scheme. Adjust your painting key. There’s a lot of things you can do to use a reference a second, third, or fourth time and have it look like an absolutely new painting.
Think of every painting as a reference audition. If you work through a painting and find that you ended up really loving something about this particular reference, make a note somewhere. Keep the reference on file. Use it again.
You might be surprised that the second or third painting of a subject is where you start really having the fun.