“Does my painting look good?” is the wrong question

I’m working on a new body of work at the moment. Abstract landscapes, mostly in oils, and a lot of them are light. I filmed a little studio session while I was working on one of them, and I found myself talking through everything that goes on in my head while I paint.

“Does this look good?” wasn’t one of them.

It’s the question most painters ask, and it’s the one that keeps so many of them stuck. It sounds sensible. You step back, have a look and decide whether it’s working. The trouble is that “good” doesn’t give you anything to do next. It’s a verdict, and verdicts don’t move a painting forward.

The questions I ask are far more useful. I want to know where your eye enters the painting and where it travels once it’s in there. Most of all, I want to know what you’re going to feel when you look at it.

Deciding where the eye goes

With this painting I wanted a really low horizon. The whole piece is about the sky, with the land sitting heavy along the bottom. Running through it there’s a band of sharper colour, and that’s my focal point. It’s where your eye lands first. From there you drift around the rest of the canvas, and that drifting is what gives it the dreamy quality I was after.

Edges do a lot of that guiding for me. Where I want your eye to glide straight over something, I keep the edges soft. Where I want it to stop, I bring in harder edges. It’s such a simple idea, and once you start painting this way you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.

Glazing for glow

Once a painting’s fully dry, I’ll often glaze it. I take a nice wide brush and mix a little Phthalo Blue with linseed oil and odourless turps, then go over the surface. Keep it really thin. You don’t want clumps of colour sitting on top, and if you get some, just wipe them back with a rag.

A glaze lets light travel through each layer, which gives you a lovely depth and glow. It also makes the surface beautiful to work into. The paint slips and glides rather than dragging on a dry canvas, and I can use my rag to pull out the lighter areas.

The colour you glaze with depends on what you’re after. A yellow will give you warm light. A darker colour will push depth into an area. You don’t have to glaze everything either. Turps on its own dries much faster, and adding linseed slows it down, so mix to suit how long you want to work.

What Monet understood

Monet painted the same haystacks over and over, in different light and different weather. The haystacks barely changed from one canvas to the next. The feeling changed every time, and that’s what he was chasing.

That’s the shift I want for you.

Stop being a slave to the photo

So many artists believe that if something’s in the reference, it has to go in the painting. It doesn’t. Knowing what to leave out and what to add in is one of the most freeing things you’ll ever learn. I’ve been painting for over 20 years now and some days I don’t use a reference at all, because I’ve stored up so many ideas over the years and I can pull them straight out.

When people look at my work, I don’t want them thinking it’s a nice landscape that could be anywhere. I want them to feel that landscape. Your edges, your focal point, your contrast and the path you lead the eye along all feed into that feeling. Every decision has a job to do.

Try this at your next painting

Before you make a single mark, pick one word for how you want the painting to feel. Calm, maybe, or wild, or dreamy. Then every time you step back, swap “does it look good?” for “does it feel like my word?”

Step back often and look at it from different spots in the room. You’ll see things you’d never notice standing at the easel.

These questions might feel like a lot to hold in your head at first. They’re not there to slow you down. Once you’ve practised them a while they become intuitive and part of how you paint, and that’s when painting gets really exciting.

This is exactly what we explore inside The Secret Language of Art, which is open now. Last time I ran it, it was amazing to watch how artists changed the way they painted and the way they worked from an image. I’d love to share more of it with you. Find out more here