I really believe that you need to know your subject. When I say “know it,” I mean you have to have spent time with it intimately, whatever this might look like for you. If you are painting animals, then you need to spend a lot of time with animals. If you paint landscapes, you need to be out walking, painting, and spending time with the landscape, specifically a landscape that’s around you. These days, painting landscapes for me means capturing what I see day in and day out in the Sonoran desert where I live. But it does not matter what landscape it is, it just has to be somewhere you have spent a lot of time.

The mechanics of things like learning basic color mixing and drawing, and all of the fundamental skills, do not get “awards” on their own. I am paraphrasing, but the fundamentals being mastered are expected in a good piece of art. We have to learn these fundamentals and master them before we can possibly create true art. I have painted some of my best works of subjects that I really knew and spent time with. This is not to say you can’t paint something that is far from your home or natural area, but to have a deep soul connection to it, it should be a subject you spend time with, whatever this may be for you personally.

If you paint still life, like flowers, it is good to have a garden or at least be around flowers a lot. You have to understand them and be connected with them. I hope you can see where I am going with this. I really believe that in order for art to have a true soul, it needs to come from an emotional connection with the artist. It is similar to a collector who buys a piece. They are choosing it because of some sort of connection. But as the creator of the piece, you should be spending, or have spent, intimate time with the subject matter in order to understand it. It is often easy to tell when a painting has no connection with the artist who painted it. It is like reading literature that has fancy vocabulary but no substance. You will notice an improvement in your work if you start painting a subject matter you are connected with.

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