DRAWING AND PAINT

The most iconic subject for a canvas painting is the landscape.  What do we learn in grammar school in our art classes?  We learn that a yellow circle is the sun and the rectangle is our house, with a flat expanse of grassy green indicating our front lawn.  Perhaps we as schoolchildren threw in a few flowers or trees as well, tribute to our budding interest in becoming artists.  Now that you have reached adulthood, you know better than that, because you have owned landscapes, prints of famous ones, too: the village scene of a blacksmith’s shop, the wide expanse of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California as rendered by Bierstadt, or perhaps the gleaning fields paintings of Corot.  In fact, you have a favorite landscape in mind, and are not ashamed to say it.  Your mind holds the perfect original abstract art landscape to your way of thinking and it is a river scene.  Your imagination reverts to happy childhood days spent along the river, making tiny toy rafts out of the shoreline reeds and watching them drift off to voyage who-knows-where.  This is your dream landscape and you wish to find a hint of it in a current piece of art.  How about looking online for an example of your dream?  The Barbizon school of France or the Hudson River school of the United States ought to be a starting point.  You peruse the vast array of paintings and find one to your satisfaction.  It has the right amount of wildlife along its shores and perhaps a busy otter in the water, dipping and diving as it travels.  Yes, this is the one to emulate.

Now that you’ve found your landscape painting, you consider commissioning an original work of art, for you have grown tired of your posters and prints.  You venture your commission to an artist and he agrees.  In fact, he has the precise methods and samples that you’re enchanted by!  You and he agree to a commission and he gets to work.  Soon your landscape is in the first stages and you are treated to the basic outline.  It looks like all it needs is to be filled in with color and delineation of shapes.  You are anxious for it to be completed and one bright day, it is.  The artist ships it to you or if you are lucky enough to have it completed by a nearby artist, you drive to the studio and collect it.  It is beautiful and as it hangs upon your walls in whichever venue you have chosen, that of office or home or in a friend’s home, you know you’ve made the right choice.  You even daydream a little about stepping into the canvas, surely a tribute to the artist’s skill in creating such a perfect place.    You can rest easy now, and slip away to visit your painting whenever you like, for a moment’s imaginary stroll along the riverside of your imaginations.  Your landscape is worthy to hang alongside that of Corot and Bierstadt and even a little bit more, because it is so very personal.