Painters love to paint places that inspire them, and people love to look at paintings that remind them of a certain place and time. I have many visitors to my studio, CHROMA, who stop in while on vacation to see what catches their eye; what painting or print they can bring home to remind themselves of the white, sandy beaches, turquoise water, and rare coastal dune lakes they experienced while visiting the beautiful 30a area of Florida.
It's more than that though. Landscape painting is more than topography. It’s more than a memory. It’s an expression of a feeling or emotion.
For the collector who buys a landscape painting of 30a, they wish to bundle up all the ways they felt while visiting, take it home and continue to feel it for as long as possible:
Beautiful, easy, joyful, peaceful, happy, calm, a sense of other worldliness.
From the artist’s perspective, a landscape painting is a scene that originally caught my attention. Was it the way the light lit up only a certain part of the marsh grasses, the clouds in the sky, the blue lupine in bloom, the shadows of saw palmettos playing in the white sand or the colors of a sunset? I’ve got to feel it before I can paint it. I feel it in my chest, and it radiates out. It becomes my intention for the painting.
It’s not enough to merely feel it. I must convey it well through the technical skills I’ve learned. This desire to express an idea is realized with lots of practice and realizations about how to express. The high point comes when the expression of the artist fulfills the desire to feel of the collector. It’s a beautiful, powerful thing.