We all look but the artist ‘sees’. Every one of us is carrying around in our heads a set of memories of what we think things look like. By kindergarten children have learnt to identify the shape of hundreds of objects and can navigate around their universe with ease, sitting on chairs, asking for fruit by name, distinguishing their yellow jumper from their blue jacket etc. As we grow older the need for further refinement on this programming may change some of these original perceptions, but many people never move beyond the thought that ‘trees are green’, dirt is brown, and apples are red and so on. Often when they desire to paint or draw these things this initial early programming can block perception of how things actually look.

Learn to See

 The process of truly learning to see what is around you, how shapes differ, how light forms objects, how colour shifts through shades and tones as light falls upon an object,  separates the artist from the casual observer. It is this process of truly seeing that will begin to reveal more about colour than what you see coming out of a tube and how colour behaves in the ‘real’ world as opposed to how we think things actually look. Understanding colour and drawing means you must be willing to go back and start really looking all over again at things you thought you knew all about.