Station Points
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Tips & Insights from James Gurney The Pencil: Thinking and Technique
as Chaucer wrote in the Tale of Melibee, a case of “familiarity breeds contempt”; that is, we tend to develop a blindness to what we so easily have at hand. We quit looking and seeing. It is a natural thing to do when our eyes are on the horizon and our minds are full of other things, but I believe that it is a risky thing to do for our development as artists. After all, we are the experts of our home location. We understand the light there, and that is no small thing. Unfamiliarity with the local light is what always confounds me when I travel to paint. It takes time to understand the movement and path of sunlight in a new location. At home, we know just when the light will be best. If we stop and look deeply at what it touches, we will soon find something to delight the eye. If you don’t have a backyard, city parks are another place which can hold treasures. Or perhaps your town, like mine, was built on a river. Go down there and spend time poking around and just looking with a creative eye. By using a viewfinder, you will quickly begin to discover interesting subjects. Best of all, what you do find will be unique to your vision. Realize that you can make these ordinary subjects into your own personal expression of
that vision. Apply enough enthusiasm and passion, and you will be on your way to making great art. Great art can result from a rock-steady personal belief in your vision, regardless of what may or may not be going on in the art world out there. The key is to believe in it, come hell or high water! I am particularly fortunate to have my home and studio in the countryside. Like the farmers who live nearby, I am constantly aware of the light and the seasons. I began seriously painting outside in 1980, when my wife, Ann, and I moved to the beautiful rural landscape of Putnam County in the Hudson River Valley of New York. Everywhere I looked, I saw paintings, no doubt helped by my familiarity with the famous works of the great artists who painted there before me. After 10 lovely years of painting there, we decided to relocate to the Midwest where we could buy land and build our home and studios.
Our new landscape, though, is not like the Hudson Valley. It is not pictorially entertaining in the grand sense. Its visual charms are very subtle and therefore require extra effort and a more contemplative mindset to uncover the diamonds strewn about. I had to spend lots of time walking around—not painting—just looking. I had to understand the light, how it moved across the landscape and what it touched along the way in every hour and season. I realized that what this Midwestern wood and pond was about was intimacy, not vast grandeur. I developed a new appreciation for everything, large and small. Once I accepted that there was incredible beauty hiding right in front of me, I began once again, to see paintings everywhere. My backyard lawn acted as a visual counterpoint to the rough wildness of the woods just beyond the gate. The woods themselves offered countless opportunities for good paintings. We planted our yard to create painting subjects, and manage our woods and meadow for the same purpose. Nearby, my neighbor’s pond was a revelation of picture possibilities. Eventually, by changing my attitudes toward my “plain” Midwestern landscape, I realized that I was surrounded by all the subject material I might ever need. I think that the poet William Blake said it best in Auguries of Innocence, “To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and Eternity in an hour.” The universal also exists in the particular, the commonplace, the details. So look around your home, your yard and your neighborhood for the potential to create wonderful art lies strewn around us like diamonds just waiting to be discovered. A selection of the best paintings I have been creating from the land around my studio will be premiered at Transcendence—truth in Nature, an exhibition scheduled to open at the Albrecht-kemper Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri in December 2020. This exhibition will present 40 paintings created over a four-year span.