It's All in How You Look at It
I love fall. The colors, the cool nip in the air, pumpkin pie - it’s my favorite time of year. I’ve always been captivated by the beauty of autumn foliage and, of course, I’ve wanted to paint fall trees in all their colorful splendor.
Southern California is not the ideal place to be if you love fall foliage so many years ago I talked Greg into taking a trip up to Yosemite National Park in late October. My plan was to photograph the trees in the park and surrounding areas and gather great reference photos for future landscape paintings.
Sadly, we got there about a week too late. The leaves had already fallen and the trees were mostly bare. We hiked and enjoyed the scenery anyway, but I was lamenting my missed opportunity to capture trees in those gold, orange, and red colors. Eventually I turned my camera to the leaves that covered the ground around the hiking trail. The colors were still vibrant so I took several pictures from that perspective. I discovered that it gave an interesting viewpoint to the subject – when life gives you lemons, right?
From a bird’s-eye-view perspective the subject took on an entirely different feel. The textures were vivid, the subtle nuances of the leaves became visible, and the rocks that the leaves were laying on made a perfect background, all of it becoming sort of a natural still life. Those reference photos were the basis for my painting “Under Foot.”
When I’m examining a subject to paint, I try to make an effort take a look at all vantage points - straight on at eye level, bird’s-eye-view, worm’s-eye-view (looking up from below the subject), and everything in between. My painting “Illumination” was painted from a worm’s-eye-view perspective. I aimed my camera straight up through the branches from underneath the tree. Because trees are very complex subjects it can be difficult to bring out every interesting feature, so focusing on one aspect simplifies things and gets the message across a little better. The worm’s-eye-view vantage point allowed me to see and accentuate the intriguing network of branches this particular tree had, with the dark sky and full moon as a background.
"Illumimation", fluid acrylic on paper
Although my Yosemite trip was initially disappointing, I’m proud to say “Under Foot” appeared in many prestigious art exhibitions, won several awards, and was featured in North Light Publishing’s Best of Watercolor series - “Splash 16 - Exploring Textures” published in 2015.
Dr. Wayne Dyer once said “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” Painting is a lot like life – sometimes seeing something from a totally different perspective can yield a surprising (and sometimes better) result!
