It took me 20 YEARS to learn THIS Oil Painting Demonstration

It took me 20 years to learn this valuable lesson. If you're feeling stuck with a painting and you feel like giving up, you're probably focused on the wrong thing. Stop focusing on that end result and just paint. You see, it's not about the outcome, it's about the process. Now, I wanna talk to you about a recent project where I came across this challenge and realized this for myself. I can't believe it took me so long to learn this lesson. So what have I got for you in this video? Well, I'm painting a couple of cows just chilling out in some clear water. And this idea, it's a little bit out of the ordinary for me. And so I was taking some cues from some old master heroes of mine. And that's when my problem started. Now, no one asked for this project, but it was just something that I was totally inspired to do. Now, of course, I've got a plan. I like to start with the end in mind. And I do have a particular methodology. And I'll share some of that with you here in this video. Now, incidentally, if you want access to the full version of this video, it's in two parts, it's well over two hours long. I break down some techniques and I also talk about some of the challenges that I ran into when I was completing this work. You'll find that by clicking the link in the description down below. So let me take you back to the beginning and talk to you about where this idea even came from. I live in the South Island of New Zealand and this type of subject is all around me. And I'm a big believer in painting what you know or painting what's near. And if you find something inspiring, then that's normally a good sign that you should be painting it. I love this idea of taking something common, something that's just every day that a lot of people would just walk on past and elevating it through art. I think it's part of our role as artists is to get the viewer to look at something and really have an appreciation for it and look at it from another angle. Sometimes when we represent a subject to a viewer, it can cause them to have this aha moment. I hope in some small way to do that with this painting. A lot of people will look at it and go, it's just a couple of cows. But when you stop and really look at it, my intent was that something special would happen. There might be a level of appreciation for something that hadn't occurred previously for the viewer and it might cause them to just pause and go, ah, it's actually quite beautiful. I never realized how lovely Herefords really are. Anyway, it was just a little idea I was playing with. Now, of course, I did start with the end in mind. I had an intent for this painting and so I mocked up a bit of a rough design. And you'll see that here. And yeah, it's a little bit of a photo bash, but it was really inspired by this one piece of reference that I shot where this cow was moving through a body of water. It's actually the same cow moving through the scene, the cow in front and the cow turned side on looking back at us. It's the same animal. And so I put these together and then I started to construct the landscape around the cows. Now, you'll notice in some of my reference that there's no willow trees in the background, but I thought, wouldn't it be nice if they were just coming into some water and there were these lovely trees behind them, just casting some shadows, there's a bit of dappled light. I just thought that would make it. And my confidence in attempting this painting was somewhat bolstered by those recent master copies that I did. One of Lucy Kemp Welch, In the Orchard, and another of Arthur Wardle's Silent Watchers. You can find those on my channel. One thing I realized by following in the footsteps of these old masters was how loose they painted. And so it was fully my intention here to embrace that loose style, just throw caution to the wind and just sling that paint. I was using much bigger brushes than I would normally and also a lot more paint volume on the end of that brush to make more expressive marks. In addition to Welch and Wardle, I was also looking at the work of Alfred Munnings, Heinrich von Zugel, and Julian Dupre. And I'm a huge believer that success leaves clues. If you wanna get what they got, you gotta do what they did. But there's so much more to it than paint application. Now, sure, we can boil some of this down to the nuts and bolts of just good old painting technique, mix a little of this with a little of that, add a dollop of medium, use this brush and you're good to go. But I think that there's more to it than just technique even. When we look at those works by the old masters, sure, they had a methodology, but there was something else that was in the mix. I'm convinced of it while they were creating their masterpieces. And perhaps it's something that many of us overlook. Now, okay, I'll speak for myself. I overlooked. When we boil it down to just technique or style, I think we're missing a really important point. Now, don't get me wrong. I was kinda happy with the way this painting came out, but there were things at this point in the process that started to niggle at me. You see, my painting wasn't really turning out like those old masters. And this is when I started feeling those first pangs of panic and even wanted to run away and flee into another project to give up on the Herefords and water and not give this painting another thought. Here with this cow, I thought it worked okay. The paint seemed to be flowing off the brush pretty nicely. I was using those beautiful Ultimate Filberts No. 2 and a few synthetics and trying to get a bit of that painterly feel whilst still maintaining control, highlighting some of that key anatomy, something that really makes a cow a cow. I felt it had some of that nice character. And so I carried on painting the cow and the dappled light across the back and working out those little subtle variations in tone and color, trying to communicate a three-dimensional form being caught in dappled light. It was a lot of fun painting some of those folds of skin around the shoulders, the front of the cow, the neck. And the way it was going to engage with the water itself was something that I was really excited by. I think this is a case with many projects that we work on. It's not all good and it's not all bad. There were definitely things about this painting that I could celebrate and other things that I was feeling really challenged by. I started to think about maybe not getting bogged down so much in those challenges and really celebrate those wins, working out what was working, but also more importantly, working out what I was focusing on when things were working. That was a key distinction. Now, one thing that came up as I was looking into some of these artists from the past was this series of paintings that Munnings had done of cows by the water. It seemed that the same cow seemed to show up again and again, and I was looking at that thinking, I quite like the pattern on that cow. Maybe I shouldn't paint Herefords. Maybe Herefords are a little bit too common. I was starting to anticipate comments that I would get, maybe on this video, but also from viewers. I got a lot of friends who are farmers too. It's just a Hereford, Tish. Settle down. And so I was thinking, well, maybe this cow in front could be something else and maybe I could have a little nod to my painting hero Munnings and change the hair pattern on this cow in front and maybe that would make a better painting. Then something interesting happened. The rear of the cow that's turned side onto us seems to line up with this cow here in front. And now it's got some sort of weird, white extended hind leg. It's quite bizarre. And it's not something that I noticed at first, but once you see it, you can't unsee it, right? So I decided to change it back. And I'm so glad I did. I felt this worked a lot better. It was a little more true to my experience. Now here with this cow, the other thing that I was thinking was it actually worked compositionally. I don't know what I was thinking when I was trying to change that hair pattern. But one thing I like to do with some of my compositions is increase tonal contrast, have areas of dark and areas of light and play those off against one another. I really liked how the bright highlight on the front of this cow's head was contrasted against the deep burgundy shaded body of the other cow. Now the water was starting to get to me. It didn't like the chocolate milk brown. And so recently when I was painting Plain Air, I noticed that a lot of these streams running through these farms are absolutely crystal clear. And there was something so nice about those cows wading through the water. A few Plain Air studies later and really studying my subject from life caused me to go back to the studio with a fresh idea. Sometimes the best way to get unstuck is to get outside. So I began to rethink my painting and I started to approach this whole situation with fresh eyes. I started to think about those experiences that I had when I was painting Plain Air and all of those beautiful little details that I was picking up when studying nature from life. My experience outside began to take over and I started to get back in touch with my initial inspiration. Those aha moments that I had out in the field when I was inspired in the first place to paint such a scene. I felt like I was totally in the moment. My mind wasn't wandering off and I kind of lost this awareness of the passage of time. Things began to flow. There were so many occasions as I mentioned that I did want to give up on this painting. And one of the things that was just niggling at me is that it was getting so far away from the way those old master paintings were looking. I mean, I'm sure they were using bigger brushes and more paint. And here I was with these little tiny brushes painting some pretty fine detail by comparison. But it's at that point that I realized this was true to my experience in the landscape. Highlighting the things that I really loved about the scene. I suddenly lost interest with how many views this project would get on YouTube. Would this painting even sell? Would it ever be taken seriously? And I really started to dig into how cool are cows? How awesome are willow trees? And that beautiful alternating texture that's formed when you've got light leaves and dark leaves and all of these different things going on. Now, don't get me wrong. Don't get it twisted. You're still really important to me. And I'm glad that you're here watching this video. I just wanted to share with you some of the things that I've been thinking about and some of these important shifts that are happening with me. That's my hope that you or someone else watching this video will be able to take just one thing from here and that it will help. See, whenever I have a breakthrough, I really wanna share that with you and talk all about it. It keeps art exciting for me, keeps things fresh and alive. So here it is. Here's the valuable lesson that I learned in a nutshell. Whenever you focus on an external outcome, really fixate on that, that this painting has to be a great painting, that it has to achieve X, Y, or Z. And also when you get caught up in how it will be perceived by others, you're trapped in the external. And that's not what it's about. It's about the internal. Really what you're doing when you're caught up in the external is you try to go against who you truly are and you're getting in the way of what needs to happen. And here I got caught up because I wanted to paint like one of those old masters rather than painting like myself. Consequently, I felt like I'd failed. And when I felt this, I wanted to run away and just give up and start working on something else. The truth is I'm always gonna paint like me. Who else can I be? And you're always gonna paint like you. Now, don't get me wrong. We can always get better, improve our skills, learn our techniques, push ourselves further forward, but there's something that needs to be happening when we're engaged in our process. And that's the ticket right there. I'm convinced of it. It's about that process and finding that flow state. And how do we know when we're in a flow state? It doesn't feel like we're forcing it. We feel totally in the moment like something just clicks. We're not aware of the passage of time and we find that we're able to focus and our mind isn't wandering off. I wanna thank you for taking this time with me here in the studio and watching this video all the way up to this point. We really appreciate you. If you wanna see the full version, make sure you click that link in the description down below. Now, I can't believe it took me so long to really twig on this idea. Again, it's not about the outcome. It's about being engaged in the process and finding that flow state when we're painting. And personally, next time I feel like giving up on a painting, I'm just gonna stop and become aware of what I'm thinking of in that moment. Because if I gave up on this painting, I would have missed some valuable lessons. And to think that this painting nearly didn't happen and we weren't gonna spend this time together. So stop thinking about the end result and just paint.